“Children are their imaginations, their hopes and their dreams,” Zsamé Morgan of Babycake’s Book Stack mobile bookstore in St. Paul, Minn., recently told PW. “I get to provide books for children to be able to grow those imaginations so that they aren’t going to be held back by anyone’s idea of who they are because of their skin color or because of their socio-economic situation.”

After three years of planning, Morgan, who at the time worked in finance, launched Babycake’s in the Twin Cities in spring 2019 with a minibus that previously was used as a bookmobile by a library in Indiana. After naming the store with her daughter’s nickname, Morgan operated Babycake’s—which has about 200 square feet of retail space, plus a storage area and bathroom —“until the snow started to fly” late in the year. Although she intended to resume operations in April 2020, the pandemic forced her to switch to online sales instead. However, Morgan quickly realized that books were more important than ever to children quarantining at home with their families. “Books give us the ability to be free and travel and dream and still grow outside of that,” she said. “During that time specifically, books gave children freedom to be a kid.”

Like other Black booksellers across the country, Morgan was both personally and professionally affected by the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020. While adults were buying books for themselves to better understand race and racism in the U.S., there was, for Morgan and her online bookstore, a “beautiful growth of child-focused organizations that wanted to diversify their bookshelves” and reached out to Babycake’s. Morgan was also receiving orders from school and business libraries, as well as individuals. Babycake’s orders did not come just from Twin Cities customers, but from people all over the world.

“It was amazing,” she recalled. “There was a lot of backlog, as everyone was trying to order the same titles. In some ways it was really hard as a Black business owner, because everyone was ordering the exact same titles from every Black-owned bookstore. The publishers couldn’t keep up and it looked like the Black booksellers weren’t able to fill orders, and that was not the case. It was a challenge, but in a way, it was a good challenge, because people started to know I was here.”

While the deluge of orders has since dropped off, she said, online customers from that period now visit Babycake’s in person around the Twin Cities—including its annual season opening on Independent Bookstore Day, parked in the lot next to Moon Palace Books, a few miles from George Floyd Square. Babycake’s also makes regular stops at the Mill City Farmer’s Market near downtown Minneapolis and Mississippi Market near downtown St. Paul.

Changing the World

Noting that people realized in the aftermath of Floyd’s death outside a South Minneapolis bodega that “the books were being written and sometimes published, but not always presented in stores,” and that children “can feel kind of isolated [when] there is a lack of representation” on bookshelves, Morgan said that “the conversation opened—not just in my bookstore, but all around.”

Babycake’s has stocked a variety of diverse titles since it launched, but Morgan decided to “really dig deep with all the emotion that was going around at the time of the murder” and focus even more on stocking such titles. She said that she made buying decisions by considering “who are the students in the classrooms? What languages do they speak? What cultures do they represent?” She feels strongly that “representation of everybody should be year-round,” not just during certain months like Black History Month in February. In fact, she regards spotlighting in such a way any group during one specific month as “almost an insult; representation is real and not just performative.”

Besides English-language books in the bookstore’s steadily growing inventory, Babycake’s stocks Spanish, Arabic, Somali, German, and sign-language titles. “Language books really fly off the shelves, especially board books,” she said. “Baby board books in different languages are probably our top sellers.”

Seasonal titles are also perennial bestsellers, such as The Big Leaf Leap (Minnesota Historical Society Press,) by Molly Beth Griffin, illustrated by Meleck Davis. “We have a lot of fun with that book,” Morgan noted.

While Babycake’s expands its inventory, it is also expanding its reach. This year, Babycake’s launched a literacy pilot program aimed at families: the Read Together Grow Together initiative provides books donated by sponsors to families to read together for 15 minutes each day, “in person, over the phone, or video chat,” to earn more books. Some families also receive a small financial incentive to participate. Morgan hopes to expand this program to include schools.

While Morgan is working on setting up a semi-permanent micro-bookstore this winter and has considered opening a permanent physical store, she is content to bide her time until she finds the space in the Twin Cities metro area that best suits the store’s mission. “I just want to make sure that wherever we land, it has a good representation of who we are serving,” she said. “I am still looking for that location. I’ve had opportunities but the areas offered to me were not my primary readership.” And if she doesn’t find such a space, she is considering adding a second bookmobile.

“I’m in a unique position, because I am able to travel,” she said, “I’m able to go to different communities.” The bookmobile is “critical” for her, enabling her to connect with the readers she wants to reach. When asked about her vision for the future, Morgan responded, “I see myself growing, getting to more schools, more events, more organizations that are child-focused.” She also wants to expand the number of foreign languages included in her inventory.

“I am always making sure that the books represent the readership,” she said. “I’ve had people come into the bookmobile and start crying and say, ‘I needed this when I was growing up.’ People of different cultures have done that and it makes me feel good to know that it’s not insane that I put together this store. I am putting in the effort to get out into communities that have different languages and different cultures and represent BIPOC readers—because we’re here and our stories are important.”