By Claire Kirch | Feb 19, 2021
It didn’t take long during his first visit to Hawaii in 2002 for Ed Justus to know he had found his place. “When I got here, it felt more like home than any other place I’d ever been,” he said. The Virginia native was so desperate to stay on the island of Kauai that he quit his job at an entertainment company, rented a house, and began selling used and antiquarian books on eBay.
Two years later, after being offered a month’s free rent in a building in the town of Hanapepe to launch a bricks-and-mortar business, Justus transferred 8,000 books from his home to the location and launched Talk Story Bookstore. He sold only used books for the first eight years, but in 2012 he began stocking new books as well.