Romance is booming: sales were up 52 percent in 2022 from the prior year, and romance books make up a fifth of all fiction sales. Pack-leading author Colleen Hoover’s numbers resemble Spotify streams (14.3 million books in 2022 alone). Just over the river in Vancouver, a romance bookstore called Romance Era opened six weeks ago, following a small spate of similar openings nationwide. Portland is lagging. 

Enter Katherine Morgan, owner of Grand Gesture Books, which opened online through Bookshop.org in November. She is bent on opening a brick-and-mortar before the third Saturday in August, otherwise known as Bookstore Romance Day. It will be the city’s first romance shop and its third Black-owned bookstore. She got the idea after watching friends open a bookstore in 2021. “I kind of mulled it over,” she says, “and then I couldn’t let it go.”

Morgan currently oversees the romance section at Powell’s City of Books downtown, the largest in-person selection in the state. She also works customer service for the online book retailer Bookshop.org. While working her two other jobs, Morgan is hunting with a realtor for the perfect physical location. In the meantime, her romance shop at Bookshop.org lets her curate a selection of titles and receive commissions from sales, without taking on the debt of stocking and shipping the books herself.

As an employee of Bookshop.org (her online store is separate from her day job with the company), Morgan assembles lists of Black-owned bookstores across the country. “Oregon just had the one,” she says, referencing Third Eye Books in Southeast Portland, a shop centered on African books that opened in 2019. Another former Powell’s bookseller, Edith Johnson, opened the second in 2022, the children’s bookstore Sunrise Books in Northeast Portland. 

Despite its success, romance still gets a bad rap. The cliché of “bodice rippers” in the grocery store checkout aisle, Morgan says, is antiquated, and she’ll forgive you for being mistaken about the genre’s representation and inclusion. “Romance just got diverse a few years back,” she says. She stocks the section at Powell’s with an impressively wide range of books, including disability-focused romance, and sees all walks of life perusing. It’s not all cat ladies after the latest Danielle Steel, Morgan jokes. She knows how to keep the mood lively, but when she says blankly that she wants to help you find a book that represents your own experience, you believe her.  

“Being a fat Black woman,” she says, “I’d like to think that, seeing my photo, [customers] might be like, ‘Oh, romance could be for everyone." She uses her past experience working at Victoria’s Secret as an example. “You know what Victoria’s Secret images look like,” Morgan said. But “when they came in, they saw me." 

Morgan says she’ll curate her own shop the same way she approaches the section at Powell’s: prurient page-turners and complicated subcultural and demographic-specific dramas get equal footing. But having her own space will allow her to expand in-person author events and create a hub for romance readers that the city is sorely lacking.