At 88, Janet Webster Jones is bookselling royalty

Publishers Weekly named Source Booksellers its 2025 Bookstore of the Year, the trade's top honor. The award put a national stamp on a Detroit institution that began with a folding table and a stack of books on African history.

Janet Webster Jones is 88 and the daughter of a librarian. She spent a 40-year career teaching in Detroit Public Schools before books became a second act. The selling started in 1989, after colleagues noticed how she shared titles on ancient African history and suggested she set up at a church bazaar. She ran what she calls a pop-up business for years, working bazaars and community events as the book lady, before she ever opened a storefront.

Source Booksellers took its current form in 2002 inside the Spiral Collective, a Cass Avenue space Jones shared with three other women-owned, African American businesses. In 2013 the store moved into its own room a short distance away, at 4240 Cass Avenue in the Auburn Building. During the pandemic it grew from roughly 800 square feet to about 1,400 and now runs with a small staff of seven, per Publishers Weekly.

The store leans almost entirely nonfiction, organized around history and culture, health and well-being, metaphysics and spirituality, and books by and about women. There is a deep Detroit shelf too, because Jones stocks for the people who actually live here. She has described herself as a bookseller carrying titles that relate to the people who are in Detroit, and she is plain about the store's limits: it does not try to be everything.

Her daughter, Alyson Jones Turner, co-owns the shop. Regulars treat the place like a living room, and the calendar reflects that, with author talks, community conversations, and mind, body and spirit classes that have included tai chi, yoga, qi gong, and belly dancing.

The nomination came from Sandra Law, a sales representative at Abraham Associates, who wrote that Jones "has dedicated her life to championing literacy, education, and history," according to Publishers Weekly. The author Hanif Abdurraqib, a frequent visitor when he passes through Detroit, called Source "a beacon of warmth, a true definition of a community-centered bookstore," per the same report.

Jones returns to a single phrase: literacy takes many forms. Audiobooks count. Reading on a phone counts. Short books count. Everybody reads.

The recognition has kept coming. In February 2026, Jones shared a Winter Institute keynote stage in a conversation with literacy advocate and actor LeVar Burton, a session the American Booksellers Association titled "Reading Is Power." At 88, she is still doing it.

Source Booksellers, 4240 Cass Avenue, in the Auburn Building, Midtown.