When Leah McNatt heard that Uppercase Bookshop was up for sale, she knew she had to do something. Uppercase had been a mainstay in Snohomish’s charming downtown retail district since 1998 and “I did not want to live in a town that didn’t have a bookstore,” McNatt explains. 

McNatt had considerable experience as a bookseller — first managing a Barnes & Noble and then at an independent bookshop — but as a new mom, she knew she couldn’t own and operate the business on her own; she needed a business partner. So McNatt asked her mother, Cheryl Cayford, if she wanted to go into business together. Ten years ago last month, Uppercase officially became a mother-daughter act.

Cayford and McNatt have just officially entered their second decade of selling used and new books to the greater Snohomish community — first from Uppercase’s longtime storefront on First Street, and then from their current location in a log cabin on Second Street that Cayford says for decades served as “a model home for a cabin kit.” 

McNatt admits that she wasn’t originally sold on the idea of selling books from a cabin. “It took me a couple tours walking through to see the promise of it — I don’t love stairs when I’m moving books up and down,” she says, adding, “but of course, there is a kind of fairy-tale feeling to it.” (The fact that parking is always a challenge on busy First Street and the Uppercase cabin came with over a dozen parking spaces was a big plus, too.)

Now, the rustic setting is intrinsic to the Uppercase Bookshop experience. “It’s important to me that when people walk in, they feel like they’re stepping away from something and into something completely different,” McNatt says. Walking into a log cabin lined with books inspires a sensation of timelessness, an invitation to forget about the world outside and instead lose hours to thoughtful browsing in the stacks.

Uppercase primarily sells used books with a few new titles mixed in, though during the pandemic they opened a digital storefront selling new books on bookshop.org that Cayford credits with helping the shop stay afloat during the lockdown. The second floor of the cabin, too, is devoted to the shop’s flourishing online used book business, through which they send titles all over the world. But creating a satisfying browsing experience is still what Uppercase does best. 

“You don’t come to my shop to find exactly what you’re looking for,” McNatt says. “You come in to find what needs to find you. Of course you can special order from us and we can get you exactly what you need, but that’s not what Uppercase is built to do.” 

Cayford, who worked in nonprofit management for 20 years before buying Uppercase with her daughter, has fallen in love with bookselling. “Every day is different, and every day I’m surrounded by a beautiful environment,” she says. “99.9% of the people that come in are so gracious, they’re thrilled that we’re here, and usually the perfect book will find them.” 

Dozens of people attend Uppercase’s long-running monthly book club, which just started meeting face-to-face again at Snohomish’s legendary Cabbage Patch Restaurant this fall after a year and a half of Zooming through the pandemic. “Just to see people in real life and hug them — oh, my goodness, it was just great,” Cayford says. The book club next gathers on Wednesday, Jan. 26 at 7 p.m. to discuss Eowyn Ivey’s debut novel “The Snow Child,” about a seemingly magical girl who emerges from a snowstorm to live with a childless Alaskan couple. 

Of course local authors like Seattle novelist Jim Lynch and the late conservationist Bob Heirman, whose “Snohomish My Beloved County” combines autobiography with tales of freshwater fishing, are perennial bestsellers at Uppercase. But McNatt says in the decade that she and her mother have owned the shop, they’ve seen Snohomish’s reading tastes change a few times over. For the first few years, the store’s customers dived further and further into the realm of literary fiction. But McNatt says browsers from Generation Z are leaning more toward the nonfiction side of the cabin.

“They’re buying vintage copies of engineering books and philosophy books,” McNatt says about Uppercase’s younger customers. “Their tastes are diverse and dynamic, and it’s absolutely wonderful.” 

What is it about nonfiction books that are appealing to Gen Z? “I think it’s the tactile nature of books and feeling like you actually own the information — it’s not going to disappear when the power goes out,” McNatt speculates.  

“Maybe it’s mushroom foraging, maybe it’s woodworking — whatever it is, the book lets you rest well at night: ‘I have that information. I own it. It sits on my shelf and I can access it whenever I want,'” she says. It’s exactly the kind of practical, sensible, somewhat romantic thing you’d expect someone who runs a bookshop out of a log cabin to say. 

Uppercase Bookshop co-owners Cayford and McNatt say the store’s large and loyal book club has found more than a few gems over the year. Cayford says Zadie Smith’s 2000 debut novel “White Teeth” was an important story to reinvestigate at a time when colonization, race and class are at the top of everyone’s minds. Washington state author J. Anderson Coats’ Civil War-era novel about a young woman in Washington territory, “The Many Reflections of Miss Jane Deming,” is “the ONLY book that 100% of the Uppercase book club wholeheartedly enjoyed,” Cayford writes in an email. “The raves were unanimous” at the Zoom book club discussion, she says — a fortunate thing, since unbeknownst to attendees Coats attended the book club incognito for the first few minutes.

Attorney and novelist James Shipman lives near Uppercase, and his Snohomish-set World War II drama “It Is Well” was another book club favorite. “He interviewed many local veterans of that war for the novel,” Cayford says, and Shipman “assured book club attendees that every family conflict he noted in the book he had experienced as an attorney with clients.” 

“One of my favorite books to sell is ‘The Night Circus’ by Erin Morgenstern,” McNatt says. “Anybody can read that book. There’s nothing offensive in it, there’s nothing vulgar, there’s nothing truly scary. But it’s dark and it’s wonderful and it’s joyous. And I don’t think I’ve recommended to a single person that has not loved it.”

When actor Viggo Mortensen was filming the movie “Captain Fantastic” a few years ago in Index, he dropped by Uppercase Bookshop and was so charmed that he sent a full supply of titles from his publishing company, Perceval Press, to Uppercase. “We’re one of four stores in the country to sell his books,” Cayford says. In return, “we sent him an Uppercase T-shirt, and we’re still waiting for him to wear it when he’s interviewed on television.”

Open noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday; 1010 Second St. B, Snohomish; 360-217-8521; uppercasebookshop.com

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