‘There Are No Words For It’: Husband And Wife Duo Behind Frugal Bookstore Reflect On Their Whirlwind 2020

For Leonard Egerton and Clarrissa Cropper, co-owners of Nubian Square’s Frugal Bookstore, the flood of interest that came out of their GoFundMe campaign this year was like nothing either of them had ever seen.

“It’s cliché, but there are no words for it,” Egerton said during a Friday interview on Boston Public Radio.

The husband and wife team had been struggling to keep their bookshop afloat in the early months of the pandemic, but once they launched their crowd-funding effort — and after Black Lives Matter protests sparked a national conversation about supporting Black-owned businesses — their problems quickly shifted to staying on top of the now overwhelming surge in demand.

“We received, I think, 20,000 orders in four days. And we couldn’t handle it,” Egerton recalled. “[It was] all hands on deck — our family, our children, our friends, nieces, nephews came to help us, and we had to actually hire a fulfillment company here in Massachusetts.”

Nearly a year later, the two say things have quieted down. But according to Cropper, business is still strong.

“We didn’t realize we had as much support in our community, and abroad… that definitely has continued,” she said. “Not on the scale that we saw over last May [and] June, but it definitely has continued, and a lot more people, customers, are conscious of wanting to support independent bookstores, and small businesses and businesses of color.”

The two have owned and operated Frugal Bookstore since 2008, after buying it from Egerton’s former boss. That man, Rob Romanow, had hired him to manage a small stand of Black-written books inside of his furniture store.

“I had never seen anything like that, and at the time I was about 42, 43 years old,” he said of seeing the collection of books strictly by Black authors.

WATCH: Leonard Egerton and Clarrissa Cropper on the silver lining of the pandemic

Today, Egerton and Cropper’s store is Boston’s only Black-owned bookshop. But their selection, in the years they’ve been in business, has expanded to include authors from a range of backgrounds.

Reflecting on the year of support both in Boston and around the world, Cropper said she and her husband have felt heartened by the "wild ride."

“We’re truly grateful,” she said. “It’s been a blessing.”