Haslam’s Book Store in St. Petersburg, Florida, for decades, it stood on Central Avenue. It was a large and full store, for whoever needed a book, a quiet hour, a surprise, or the comfort of wandering among shelves.
I used to visit Haslam’s years ago, and what I remember most is the feeling of it. It was delightful in the old meaning of the word, not polished or staged, but genuinely interesting. A person could go in looking for one book and come out with something entirely different, which is one of the highest compliments a real bookstore can earn.
Haslam’s was the kind of place where browsing mattered.
A family bookstore born in hard times
Haslam’s began in 1933, during the Great Depression, when John and Mary Haslam opened a small used book and magazine business in St. Petersburg. What began modestly grew over the decades into one of Florida’s great independent bookstores. The shop eventually became known as Florida’s largest new and used bookstore, a sprawling landmark filled with hundreds of thousands of books.
Its long-time home was 2025 Central Avenue, where the store had been located since 1964. For many people in St. Petersburg and beyond, that address became more than a location. It became part of the city’s literary memory.
Haslam’s carried inventory of new books, used books, local history, old paperbacks, serious literature, forgotten nonfiction, odd titles, and books that looked as if they had been waiting years for the right person to notice them.
That is one of the quiet powers of an old bookstore. It does not only sell what is new. It preserves what has not yet finished speaking.
Jack Kerouac and the books that would not stay shelved
No story about Haslam’s can be told without mentioning Jack Kerouac.
Kerouac, the author of On the Road, spent his final years in St. Petersburg. He died there in 1969, at only forty-seven years old. During his time in the city, he was known to visit Haslam’s. Over the years, a local story developed around him and the store: that Kerouac would come in and move his own books to more prominent places on the shelves.
It is a wonderfully human detail, whether remembered as fact, folklore, or some mixture of both. The famous writer, restless even in a bookstore, still trying to make sure his books were seen.
But the story did not end with his death.
Haslam’s became associated with reports that Kerouac’s books sometimes fell from the shelves or seemed to move. The tale attracted ghost hunters, readers, writers, and curious visitors. Some treated it playfully. Others took it more seriously. Either way, the legend settled into the store’s identity.
Was Haslam’s haunted by Jack Kerouac?
That depends on what a person means by haunted.
If haunted means that a spirit remained there, still restless among the shelves, then that belongs to the world of belief and local legend. But if haunted means that a place can hold the memory of the people who passed through it, then Haslam’s was certainly haunted. Haunted by readers. Haunted by writers. Haunted by the old St. Petersburg that once gathered there. Haunted by the weight of so many books handled, opened, bought, sold, and remembered.
Bookstores collect more than books. They collect presence.
The old pleasure of getting lost
The best part of Haslam’s was that it invited you to wander.
Modern shopping often wants us to know what we want before we arrive. Search bar. Click. Checkout. Done.
Haslam’s was the opposite of that. It rewarded drift. You could move from one section to another without much concern for time. You could discover a Florida history book you had never heard of, a strange old novel, a field guide, a forgotten biography, or a paperback with someone else’s name written inside.
That is the charm of used bookstores. Every book carries a small shadow of its earlier life. A price penciled in the corner. A receipt used as a bookmark. A pressed leaf. A note in the margin. A dedication from someone long gone.
In a shop like Haslam’s, books felt less like products and more like travelers.
That may be why people still talk about it with such affection. They are not only remembering the books they bought. They are remembering the experience of being allowed to look, linger, and find something unexpected.
The closing that became a mystery
In March 2020, Haslam’s closed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many stores closed temporarily during that difficult period, but Haslam’s did not reopen.
Years passed.
The building remained on Central Avenue. The future of the shop became uncertain. Local readers wondered whether it would ever return. Reports continued to describe the bookstore as closed, with its fate unclear. By 2025 and 2026, articles were still being written about the unanswered question: what would happen to Haslam’s?
The uncertainty has become part of the story now.
A closed bookstore is different from a closed restaurant or shop. There is something especially painful about imagining shelves of books sitting in silence behind locked doors. A bookstore is meant to be entered. Books are meant to be touched, opened, argued with, carried home. When a place like Haslam’s closes, it feels as if a conversation has been interrupted mid-sentence.
Perhaps that is why the store still holds people’s attention. It has not been neatly finished in the public imagination. It has not become only memory. It is still there, in some form, waiting on Central Avenue, while readers keep asking whether the story is over.
Why Haslam’s matters
Haslam’s matters because it was a true independent bookstore in the deepest sense.
It was family-rooted. It was local. It was large without feeling corporate. It held new and used books together under one roof, which meant the latest title could sit not far from a book that had survived three owners and half a century.
It also belonged to Florida’s literary landscape. Not the polished brochure version of Florida, but the stranger and more interesting one. The Florida of Central Avenue, old neighborhoods, humid afternoons, literary ghosts, estate books, local characters, and people who still believe that a bookstore can be a destination.
For those of us who remember visiting, Haslam’s remains alive in a particular way. We remember the aisles. We remember the abundance. We remember the pleasure of not knowing what we might find.
And maybe that is the real ghost of Haslam’s.
Not only Jack Kerouac moving his own books. Not only the tales of books falling from shelves. But the lingering spirit of a place where books were allowed to accumulate, where readers were allowed to wander, and where the past was never very far from the present.
Some stores close and disappear quickly from memory.
Haslam’s has not.
It remains one of Florida’s storied bookshops, a place people still speak of with longing, curiosity, and affection. Whether its doors ever open again or not, Haslam’s has already earned its place in the larger history of American bookstores.
It was a bookshop with shelves, ghosts, dust, stories, and time.
And for anyone who ever loved wandering through it, that is more than enough reason to remember.
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