Bringing the enchantment of an independent bookstore to your community, Lioness Books creates a unique experience for our customers, weaving literary magic through the heart of Texas.
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EXCITING ANNOUNCEMENT!
We Are Putting Down Roots!
We're thrilled to announce that a permanent location is coming soon to Old Town Leander. While we’re still finalizing the details, we can’t wait to welcome you into a cozy space filled with good books, warm vibes, and community connection. Stay tuned for updates—we’ll share more as we get closer to opening day!
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We ❤ Literacy
Lioness Books supports literacy-driven non-profits in our community to make reading accessible for all. Working with local businesses allows us to keep our economy local, while also empowering our mission-aligned non-profit partners.
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At Lioness Books, we believe that books are not merely a matter of ink and paper, but are armories brimming with the untamed ordinance of freedom, ideas, transformation, progress and inspiration; arsenals forged to fight the soul-silencing tyranny of ignorance and suppression. Under current political conditions, the United States has seen an alarming escalation in the scope and scale of book censorship, with our great state of Texas leading the charge in aggressive restriction of accessing books which explore race, gender, sexuality, and social justice. In 2025, the banning of books has re-emerged not as a fringe idea or lesson in history, but as a strategy within a broader effort to control cultural narratives and shift our truths. Disguised as protection, this current call for censorship threatens the very essence of what a bookstore believes in and represents… a free exchange of ideas. We, as Texans, are standing at an epochal crossroads, facing a challenge that is not simply a battleground for intellectual freedom, but a fatal threat to democracy herself. Here at Lioness Books, we are resolute in our dedication to this struggle, and we are committed to fight without compromise nor capitulation. Texas, more than any other state, leads the country in formal book challenges and bans. According to data from PEN America, a nonprofit organization that tracks censorship in literature, Texas school districts have led the nation in book bans for the past five years. These bans often target works of LGBTQ authors, books by and about people of color, and works that confront America’s historical injustices. The political justification tends to hinge on vague or loaded terms such as obscenity, indoctrination, or inappropriate content, without recognizing the literary or didactic value of the works in question. What we are witnessing in Texas is not just a reaction to individual titles, but the deliberate use of censorship as a political weapon to reshape public education and discourse. State legislators have passed and proposed laws that limit how teachers can discuss race and gender in classrooms, and library materials are now under scrutiny from elected boards, whose knowledge of literature and learning is more often than not, slim to none. These developments are not isolated. They are part of a coordinated national trend that has pushed Texas out front as the ideological epicenter and political testing-ground for this refurnished brand of censorship. These bans do more than remove books; they erase the experiences of marginalized communities, signaling to students - especially those from underrepresented groups - that their stories don’t matter. We believe our youth deserve better. They deserve literature that reflects the full spectrum of human experience, and to deny access to those diverse perspectives is to rob them of a chance to develop critical thinking, empathy, insight, and a nuanced understanding of the world. The pages of history are stained with the consequences of book bans, a tactic employed by those who seek to suffocate the human spirit’s capacity for thought and soulful transformation. In Nazi Germany, the beginning flames of fascism were fed with kindling constructed of novels, poems, political papers, and science texts deemed un-German, degenerate , or contrary to the country’s nationalist ideology. Their 1933 book burnings were not vandalism but a calculated effort to erase ideas that threatened fascist control, setting the stage for the cultural and moral devastation that was soon to come. In the Jim Crow South, from Reconstruction through the Civil Rights era, books that affirmed the dignity of Black Americans or exposed the horrors of racism - like Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God - were systematically excluded from public access to preserve the narrative of racial inferiority. The McCarthy era in 1950s America also echoed this fear of ideas, as the government’s frantic, anti-communist crusade led to the blacklisting of authors, librarians, and teachers. Works such as Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes Of Wrath were pulled from library shelves beneath the accusation of promoting leftist ideals, and for daring to question the status quo. History offers countless parallels: the 16th century burning of Mayan codices, and the erasing of indigenous knowledge by the Spanish, or the Chinese Communist Party’s destruction of counterrevolutionary texts during the Cultural Revolution. Each instance reveals censorship as the weapon of choice for those who fear the power of knowledge and the capacity of the right words to awaken consciences, stir emotions, and ignite movements of change. These lessons from the past compel us to resist the book bans of today, recognizing them as assaults on the very essence of intellectual and moral freedom. Texas - where freedom and independence have long been considered God-given birthrights - we must resist being the next to fall into the goose-step march of oppression, censorship, and control. Our children deserve better. Our teachers deserve better. Our future deserves better, and our democracy - messy, plural, and defiant - demands better. For Lioness Books, our resistance to this suppression is not just a matter of principle. It is a recognition of literature’s role in the eternal struggle for justice and truth. We call home a state where the political climate has become increasingly hostile towards dissent, and where public education is being transformed into a war of ideological conformity. As a bookstore, we are under no illusion that our shelves alone can halt these efforts. But we believe in the power that books possess in uniting and sustaining resistance and delivering hope. By preserving access to stories, we preserve the heartful soul of culture; we preserve truth. When we defend the right to read; we affirm liberty and the right to question, dream, and dissent. This has nothing to do with nostalgia. This is survival. Lioness Books will continue to stock what is banned, what is hidden, what is suppressed, and we will celebrate what is silenced. We will carry the voices forward proudly and full-throated. Because history shows us, when you ban a book, you don’t erase its truth… you ignite its power.
Lioness Books is highlighting the freedom to read and the dangers of censorship this August with Banned Books Month. Anne Russey, co-founder of the Texas Freedom to Read Project, talks with us about advocating against book bans and censorship, and the biggest roadblocks they face in the process. Russey also shares the inspiration for their nonprofit organization as well as their mission and values. We are running a social campaign all month long—DM us a photo of you with your favorite banned book to be featured on our socials (@lionessbookstx)! Check out our curated booklists featuring a variety of banned books on our Bookshop and Libro sites too.
In a world increasingly built on the transient, the trendy, the swift, and the disposable, rare and antiquarian books stand as testaments to permanence, intention, and the physicality of knowledge. They are not simply vessels of content, but expressions of culture; culture you can touch and preserve. At Lioness Books, our mission transcends the simple act of selling books. It is about curating experiences, assembling libraries not only of words, but of meaning. That is why we have decided to expand our collection to include antiquarian, rare, and collectible books. This is a natural progression for us, not a TikTok craze or a trend driven pivot. It is a purposeful expansion born from our core values, an evolution committed to depth and legacy. For in the world of books, trends are fleeting but legacy always endures. Let’s define our terms carefully, because this is a space where language matters. The distinctions between antiquarian, rare, and collectible books are rooted in their origins and significance. Antiquarian books, typically born before the boom of industrial printing, are historical artifacts. Printed on handmade paper and bound by artisans, they were labors of love and craft, and from an era when books were considered treasures, often housed in private collections and passed down from generation to generation. Rare books, regardless of age, are valued by their scarcity, whether due to limited printing, notable provenance, historical suppression, or singular attributes like authorial inscriptions or errata; a first edition of Galileo’s “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems” (printed in 1632 and banned by the Inquisition), and Harriet Ann Jacobs’s slave narrative “Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl” are both perfect examples of this rarity. Collectible books, while sometimes overlapping with antiquarian and rare, are defined by their historical, cultural, or aesthetic significance. For example, a signed first edition of Dickens’s “A Tale of Two Cities” or the seminal and prosecuted poetry collection “The Love Book” by counterculture icon Lenore Kandel, are both considered collectible, along with illustrated editions, niche genres, or books with personal inscriptions. These treasures are often coveted due to their unique ability to encapsulate pivotal moments in literary history or embody the personal, artistic touch of their creators, making them cherished pieces of our cultural heritage. The allure of these books is their capacity to signify beyond their content. A rare book, such as a copy of a 19th-century abolitionist pamphlet, is a codex of resistance, its scarcity a testament to what it defied. An antiquarian book, with its marginalia or bookplate, becomes a linked-text, connecting readers across the centuries through recognized and shared engagement. Collectible books, whether valued for their aesthetic beauty or their role in literary history, are icons of cultural memory, their value amplified by the stories they carry. For the book lover, handling such volumes is a dialogue with the past that reveals the eternal power of the written word. At Lioness Books, we consider our expansion into the antiquarian, rare, and collectible book market an act of cultural stewardship, a commitment to preserving the material signs of human thought and creation. These books are not mere commodities but relics. They are legacies and testimonies which outlast trends, endure censorship, and speak to us from generations past. To engage with them is not just to read, but to remember, to feel, to understand, and to inherit. To make our collection more accessible, we have launched an eBay storefront, where the majority of our rare and antiquarian collection will be available to browse and purchase. This platform allows us to reach a broader audience (collectors, scholars, and passionate readers around the world) while ensuring each book is accurately described, carefully packaged, and treated with the care it deserves. For those who prefer the immediacy of browsing in person, we are curating a rotating in-store selection of notable works - titles chosen not only for their value or rarity but for the way they resonate with our community and the literary spirit of Lioness. In this era of doom-scrolling and self-serving algorithmic curation, we offer an alternative: intentionality. To collect a rare book is to rebel against disposability. To preserve an antiquarian volume is to guard the voices that history tried violently to silence. And to walk into a store like ours is to believe that discovery still matters, that there are still books waiting to find you, and still readers who will know what it means when they do. We at Lioness invite you to join us in this new chapter, and we encourage all collectors, readers, historians, and lovers of the written word to support small local businesses like ours, especially now. The existence of independent bookstores like Lioness depends on a community that still believes in craftsmanship, care, and the power held in objects that bear our stories, our sufferings, and our splendor. Because that’s what books are. They are not simply commodities, they are evidence. Of defiance. Of beauty. Of brilliance that refuses to disappear.
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