Sarah Turner’s mobile bookshop is heading your way.
By Carmen Shea Brown
Photos by Steven Ross
Step into Sarah Turner’s Booked and Bound mobile bookshop, and you will be immediately transported to a European library, replete with old green-grass accents, dark wood, and green-colored glass library lamps. And the first thing you will notice, as visitors have been quick to point out, is it “smells like a bookstore.”
“I’ve always been inspired by the libraries in Europe,” Turner says. “I think they’re just beautiful, and they have this amazing architecture. You just want to curl up by a fireplace with a good book. I wanted something that was welcoming and comfortable.”
Turner’s traveling book studio, based in Alabaster, is part of a slowly growing trend of pop-up book trailers across the country. Turner officially launched Booked and Bound on April 12, 2025, at the Corbin Farms Winery Spring Wine Festival and has since found success bringing her collection to events all over the Birmingham area and beyond. Turner normally takes Booked and Bound to about three events per week, including local farmers markets, book clubs, and festivals.
“My best day ever was at the Rocky Heights book fair,” Turner says. “I’ve done other markets like Vegan Fest, because I’m a vegetarian, and that was important to me. Visiting book clubs has been great too. Some of the other events, like the book bedazzling, I partnered with Houseplant Collective for those.”
Turner has an inventory of close to 700 books, and she specializes in romance novels. Her core demographic is women in their 20s to 40s, and when these readers are burned out on standard romance tropes, Turner fiercely defends author Sarah J. Maas of A Court of Thorns and Roses fame by redirecting them to her Throne of Glass series, praising its “female assassin” lead and the “emotional devastation” that makes readers weep and celebrate.
“I get great recommendations from my customers, and I hope that I’m able to provide the same ones,” she says. “There’s nothing quite as nice as someone after they bought a book saying ‘Thank you so much for that recommendation, I love that book.’”
More recently, however, Turner’s collection has expanded to include thrillers and sci-fi novels to cater to many of the male customers who visit the truck. She has also since added children’s books, including classics like The Secret Garden, the Harry Potter series, and even classics from older generations like The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series and The Boxcar Children, after parents kept bringing kids on board at her first few pop-ups.
“I wasn’t anticipating adding kids’ books, but at my first six events, people kept bringing their kids on the truck, and they’re like, ‘Do you have books for children?’ And I hated saying no,” Turner says. “And I felt like the moms would be more inclined to stay if I had books for the younger ones.”
In addition to these novels, Turner also has a special mission to highlight local authors, which came from her own awakening about the realities of running a small business and wanting to support writers doing the same. Those included in her collection include fiction author Valerie Pepper (describing her books as “hilarious”) and Christian fantasy author Alison Robinson, both of Birmingham. Robinson’s debut novel, Shadowless, was Booked and Bound’s top seller during its entire first year in business.
“When I started searching, I saw we have some amazingly talented local people,” Turner says. “Being able to put those novels out there and by proxy meeting and talking with these authors has just been amazing. I’m so grateful to get to support them because their books are really good.”
Turner sometimes gets discouraged when she hears customers say they can find better deals on Amazon. However, despite fierce competition from mass retailers and online companies, she believes independent bookstores—and, more recently, mobile bookstores like hers—are growing because they provide a sense of connection among book readers that they can’t get anywhere else.
“I get this sense of fulfillment just talking about books to people, because a lot of us readers are looking to get out of reality for a little bit,” Turner says. “It’s somewhere comfortable that if they want to get out of the house, this is not an intimidating place to do it. We can talk books, or you can talk silently, but it’s that experience of getting out and holding the book.”
Looking back on the past year, Turner made a big pivot from what she was doing before: working in cybersecurity for UAB. In fact, she had no professional background with bookselling at all. It was a huge change in direction, but she views it as a blessing in disguise that she shifted her identity from a corporate career to being a small business owner. While she loved her cybersecurity work, she wanted a personally fulfilling side hustle. “I hemmed and hawed about it for months, and then my sweet husband, Austin, was finally like, ‘let’s just go buy a trailer,’” Turner says. “So, he is really the reason it happened. Otherwise, I would have just waited and not pursued this dream.”
Then she realized something: It was the one-year anniversary of the last day at her former job, which signified the beginning of her reinvention. “My identity for a long time has been wrapped up in my career, and so it’s been a lot to be like, no, I’m a small business owner instead,” Turner says. “I love my little book truck, and I wouldn’t change it for the world.”
For more information or to book Turner for an event, email bookedandbound@gmail.com. Stay up to date via her Facebook and Instagram at Booked and Bound and @booked_and_bound respecitively.