Photo by Katy St. ClairCourtney Gann and Krystal Stewart opened The Book Burrow in Lebanon, Missouri in January of 2025.
Purchase Photo
Purchase Photo
Lifestyle
Inside the Book Burrow in Downtown Lebanon
At The Book Burrow in downtown Lebanon, best friends turned business partners serve up moody decor and indie books.
by Taryn Shorr-McKee
Oct 2025
What began as a longtime dream between two book-loving best friends has become one of Lebanon’s most charmingly offbeat local businesses. Courtney Gann and Krystal Stewart opened The Book Burrow (14 W. Commercial St., Lebanon, MO) in January 2025 with the intention of making it equal parts indie bookstore and cozy hangout. Think Gilmore Girls meets dark academia—all heart, with a witchy soul and rapidly growing fan base.
The duo met in hair school over 20 years ago, but weren’t exactly fond of one another at first. Everything changed when they discovered a mutual Harry Potter obsession. The shop’s name, a nod to the Weasley family home in the series, pays tribute to that moment—and the shared literary love that sparked a friendship, a decade-plus of doing hair side by side, the aptly named Scissor Sisters podcast and now, a bookstore. “It’s always been books,” Gann says.
Gann and Stewart didn’t set out to create a side hustle. The two still work at Tribe Salon, which Gann opened in 2017 and now anchors the back half of the building, and they’d long fantasized about a bookstore of their own. An October 2024 trip to Salem, Massachusetts, sealed the deal: They returned home and transformed the front of the salon into their dream bookshop. The pair pitched the concept to their skeptical husbands and remodeled, painting and knocking down walls. “We just did it,” Gann laughs. “No one should take business advice from us, honestly—we had a ‘we’ll just figure it out’ attitude. And we did.”
The Book Burrow opened with around 800 books. Within four hours, more than 500 sold, bringing in over $9,000. Two days later, the store was nearly cleaned out. Today, it greets visitors with black walls, a once-hidden fireplace and shelves packed with hard-to-find indie authors spanning everything from dark romance and fantasy to true crime and literary fiction. Local makers supply most of the shop’s merch and gifts, including herbal tinctures, custom journals and fan-favorite T-shirts featuring quotes from rare one-star reviews. One top seller: “Waste of space and creepy decor.” Stewart puts a positive spin on it and calls the review “the perfect tagline.”
The store’s success is partly thanks to Gann and Stewart’s podcast, which always opens with a book review, and partly thanks to their shared passion and chemistry. “We’re yin and yang,” Stewart says. “She’s the risk-taker, I’m the realist.” Gann adds, “We’re like the perfect human together.”
It helps that their friendship goes far beyond work—or, perhaps, why their friendship goes far beyond work. Their families vacation together in Anna Maria Island, Florida, every year. They take an annual girls’ trip to Universal Studios to “nerd out” in the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. And they have been in the same book club for 15 years.
Another piece of The Book Burrow’s magic? More than a bookstore, it’s a place to linger, to cozy into. With fall and spooky season officially upon us—what Stewart says “perfectly fits our vibe” and Gann calls the shop’s “time to shine”—the pair is busy hosting The Book Burrow’s new book club and themed events like a Twilight 20th anniversary midnight release party, book bedazzling nights and community collabs with their downtown neighbors. And they’re just getting started. “We want to be one of those destination bookstores people travel to,” Gann says. “And we’ll still be here, little old ladies slingin’ books.”
Stewart agrees: “We didn’t want to be just a place that sells books. We don’t consider this work…it’s our dream job.”
