BEL AIR, Md. — Exchanging a popular pop-up business for one grounded in the Bel Air Armory Marketplace, the Odd Bird Bookshop grew out of Jessica Rosado’s creative vision designed to be different.
“We just got a resounding response from the community being like, ‘Oh my God! I love this!’ or ‘I love this detail!’ or ‘I love that you (or we) do a grownup book fair a couple of times a year!’, said Rosado, “and we bring back all of the classics from the Eighties and the Nineties of sort of the scholastic book fairs they had in schools of Baby-Sitters Clubs and Goosebumps books.”
With its grand opening set for Saturday, April 11th, no detail is too small as family and friends focus as much on the space as the new and used books, which will fill it.
The Odd Bird Bookshop is coming to Bel Air pretty soon:
The inspiration behind Rosado opening her own bricks and mortar, permanent location was her 19-year-old daughter, Lyric Stoker.
Sensory overload often denied her the relaxed, family atmosphere her mother tried to bring to her business as it moved about.
“Depending on the brightness of the lights, I tend to get headaches and I can’t focus properly,” Stoker told us, “If a room is too hot, I can’t focus. If there’s too many loud noises, I can’t focus. It’s just the overstimulation becomes too much to function.”
“My entire family has some sensory issues, a variety of them, whether it be the lights or fabrics or noises and things like that,” added Rosado, “so I knew this was something the community needed and I really truly built it for her, but I also know that there are so many people out there that struggle with the same sort of thing.”
People who have rallied behind the sensory-friendly, independent bookstore, donating both their money and their time to help create this odd bird, if not different and special, bookshop.
“I wanted that. I wanted community,” said Rosado, “I wanted somewhere that people felt like, ‘I’m going to my bookstore.’ You know like they had a hand in building this and that was really important to me.”
