Terrie Morris spent 46 years teaching elementary school kids how to love reading. Now, at 68, she's opening a bookstore built on the same idea — except this time, the whole neighborhood gets to pick what goes on the shelves. The Reading Garden is set to open at 11 a.m. on Nov. 17 at 1489 E. 151st St. in Olathe, selling books for all ages alongside gifts, candles and plants.
Morris calls the shop “community chosen,” a description that gets at how she's stocking it: by taking recommendations from the people who will actually shop there, according to The Kansas City Star. She retired in May 2025 from Mission Trail Elementary School in Leawood, where she taught for 35 of her 46 years in the classroom, according to Johnson County Post. Some of her shelves will be organized around nationally recognized book lists and book clubs, including titles pulled from Today Show, Oprah and Good Morning America recommendations, per the Star's reporting — alongside her own picks and suggestions from family and friends.
Retirement didn't start the way Morris expected. She began it by caring for her husband, who died a few months later in 2025, the Star reports. She took possession of the Olathe storefront — a former staffing agency space — in July 2026 and started renovating the following month with help from her two children and their families.
Books, Plants and a Nod to Classroom Budgets
The shop is pricing its inventory with the surrounding community's budgets in mind, though it isn't skimping on splashier items: a Harry Potter collector's set will run $133, per the Star. The Reading Garden will also carry plants from Linwood, Kansas-based Free State Growers, Johnson County Post reports, turning the space into what that outlet describes as a reading and plant sanctuary.
Beyond the sales floor, the store will include two back rooms — one set up for book clubs and reading, the other for remote workers, according to the same Johnson County Post account. Morris has said she wants to employ local residents who are looking for community and purpose, not just a paycheck, the Star notes.
Hours are still shaping up around a daily 11 a.m. opening. The store is expected to close at 6 p.m. Monday, Wednesday and Friday; 7 p.m. Tuesday and Thursday; and 4 p.m. Saturday, per the Star's reporting.
Olathe's Second New Bookstore This Fall
The Reading Garden isn't the only new bookshop on Olathe's map this season. 3 of Cups opened earlier in October inside a historic house near downtown Olathe, about ten minutes north of where Morris is setting up shop, according to the Star. That store has been called Olathe's first independent bookstore in decades — it's a general-interest shop at 101 W. Cedar St. that also sells games and book-themed gifts, and even rents out ten copies of the same title to book clubs for $50 over a four-week period, as the Kansas City Star reported when it opened.
The timing fits a broader pattern across the metro. Independent bookstores have been multiplying in the Kansas City area even as national reading habits shift — a June CBS News poll found 36% of Americans say they're reading fewer books than they did a decade ago, as Axios Kansas City reported. Yet the American Booksellers Association counted a 70% jump in U.S. bookstore companies between 2021 and 2025, rising from 2,010 to 3,416, and 73% of booksellers reported higher sales last year, per the same Axios account.
Locally, that growth looks like Under the Cover, a romance-only shop that expanded into the storefront next door, and Smitten Booktique, which grew from a bookmobile into a permanent home in Leawood — both cited by Axios. BLK + BRWN, which opened in 2021, centers books by Black, Brown and Indigenous authors. There were 2,844 independent bookstore locations nationally in 2023.
For Morris, the appeal seems less about riding a trend and more about continuing the work she did for decades in a classroom — just with a storefront instead of a chalkboard, and neighbors instead of students helping decide what's worth reading next.
