There’s only one way to amass 135,000 books, said John Dillman, co-owner of Kaboom Books in the Woodland Heights neighborhood—“one by one."

John Dillman and his wife, Dee Dillman, established the used bookstore in June 2007, after moving to Houston post-Katrina, they said.

How we got here

The Dillmans said they had a series of shops in New Orleans, where they learned people don’t stray too far from their normal traffic patterns.

That’s why, to transfer their customers from a smaller, temporary location on Studewood from to the larger, permanent space on Houston Avenue, they removed every fiction title that started with the letter ‘P’ from the old shop to the new one.
Kaboom Books owners' strategically rerouted traffic from a temporary Studewood bookstore to its permanent Houston Avenue location by removing any fiction or books by authors who's names start with the letter 'P.' (Asia Armour/Community Impact)
Kaboom Books owners' strategically rerouted traffic from a temporary Studewood bookstore to its permanent Houston Avenue location by removing any fiction or books by authors who's names start with the letter 'P.' (Asia Armour/Community Impact)
“I said that it was in homage to Georges Perec, the French writer who wrote [‘La Disparition’], in which he did not use the letter E at all,” John Dillman said. “So what I did was I took all of the ‘P’s’ out of the fiction alphabet over there. So if people were looking for Proust or something like that, [they’d] have to come over here.”


What they offer

Kaboom’s bookshelves are stacked ten rows and higher and divided in more than 84 subsections—with titles in art, history, fiction, physical science and social science, John Dillman said.
Co-owner Dee Dillman chatted with a customer about her love for 1960's movie posters. (Asia Armour/Community Impact)
Co-owner Dee Dillman chatted with a customer about her love for 1960's movie posters. (Asia Armour/Community Impact)
Sixty percent of the books come from people's personal estates, John Dillman said. Despite having more than 100,000 titles, the Dillmans said their books are quality, and they only deal in what they know.

“The whole point of this [bookstore] is to have a browse,” John Dillman said. “So, I don't want to have to recommend books for you or something. It's one of those things where you keep the crap to a minimum.”

Why it matters


Though Kaboom Books is a small business, and the Dillman's try to cycle books out as quickly as they come in, it serves the surrounding Houston neighborhood as a “social good,” simply because of the ideas that are shared between pages, John Dillman said.
Dee Dillman (left) and John Dillman (right) have owned the Woodland Heights bookstore for nearly 20 years. (Asia Armour/Community Impact)
Dee Dillman (left) and John Dillman have owned the Woodland Heights bookstore for nearly 20 years. (Asia Armour/Community Impact)
“The ideas that are inculcated in the books are always worthwhile,” John Dillman said. “The fact of the matter is, if you want to know what, as an instance, the Greeks felt about things 2,000 and more years ago, the only way you’re going to be able to find it out is in a book.”