Family Book Shop

Family Book Shop occupies a 7,000-square-foot building on North Woodland Boulevard in DeLand, a scale that sets it apart from most independent bookstores, which typically run a fraction of that size. Owners Kerry and Kaaren Johnson took over the shop in 2015, continuing an operation that has served the DeLand community for more than 40 years, which makes it one of the longer-running independent retail businesses in the city regardless of category. The shop stocks new, used, and collectible titles across essentially every genre, with an inventory the store itself puts at more than 400,000 titles, a number large enough to make browsing here closer to visiting a small research library than a typical retail bookstore.

Membership in the Florida Antiquarian Book Association, the American Booksellers Association, and the Southern Independent Booksellers Association places Family Book Shop within the network of professional and trade organizations that independent booksellers use to source rare and collectible material, host traveling author events, and stay connected to the broader used-book trade. That antiquarian focus means the shop is not simply a place to buy a paperback; it also functions as a resource for collectors looking for out-of-print or first-edition material, a category that requires real expertise to source and price correctly.

For everyday customers, the shop offers trade credit for used books, a system that lets regular sellers build store credit rather than cash out every transaction, which is one of the more practical reasons a used bookstore builds a loyal local following instead of a one-time customer base. The size of the space also means Family Book Shop can dedicate real square footage to hosting author events, something a smaller storefront could not accommodate as easily.

The shop is open six days a week, Monday through Saturday from 9:30am to 5:30pm, closing only for the standard set of major federal holidays. Its location on North Woodland Boulevard puts it north of DeLand’s compact historic downtown core, in a stretch of the boulevard with more room for a large freestanding building, distinct from the narrower storefronts closer to the courthouse square. That extra space is part of what makes the shop function differently from a typical downtown bookstore squeezed into a single narrow storefront, giving staff room to sort, shelve, and display a collection of this size in a way that stays browsable rather than overwhelming.

For anyone in West Volusia County looking to sell a personal book collection, track down an out-of-print title, or simply spend an afternoon browsing shelves that run deeper than almost any other bookstore in the region, Family Book Shop remains one of the most established independent retailers in DeLand. Its combination of longevity, inventory size, and active participation in national bookseller associations sets it apart from newer shops still building a reputation, and its continued operation under local ownership after a 2015 change in hands shows the kind of business succession that keeps a community bookstore alive across generations of owners.