Amber Puzey is the first to tell you her shop, A Lettered Home, is not merely a bookstore – it’s a love letter to the city of West Richland, written with her own hand.

“I used to ride my bike down here when I was little,” Puzey said from inside the business that opened last fall at 5335 W. Van Giesen St. “My friends and I would just sit in the library all day.”

Those experiences were likely the first drafts of a life spent around books and reading. “They’re kind of two different hobbies almost,” she said. What she means is that the culture of books – collecting them, curating lists and loving bookish objects like stationery and tote bags – is its own hobby and identity that creates the joy of being surrounded by stories.

Reading, on the other hand, is something deeper and more internal. “It becomes just a piece of who you are,” she said. “I remember where I was in life based on what book I was reading,” she said. “What house I lived in, what hard thing was going on; I can remember the book I had in my hands.”

Puzey found a partner who shared her love, recalling the origin story with the man she’d marry. “Our date nights were going to browse Barnes & Noble,” she said. Later, when they traveled, the couple hunted down used bookstores to visit.

“When we opened this store, probably half the books in here were ours,” she said.

A return to West Richland

As with any good tale, the path to opening was far from simple. Yet, Puzey feels there were so many notes in the margin of her life pushing her toward where she is today – in the bookstore she opened, in a building her father built and ran an engineering consulting company out of, before her brother used it as a car stereo shop.

Along the way, Puzey had gone to college and lived in Seattle, where she was in the same book club for 17 years.

“There was an English professor in the group,” she said, laughing. “It was pretty highbrow.” That’s where Puzey says she expanded love from reading to literature – including classics and nonfiction.

Her husband’s job took them to the south and after the pandemic came the plot twist in life: A plant shutdown and mass layoffs pushed the Puzeys to West Richland, which had evolved in the years since she left.

“I didn’t have friends here anymore,” she said. “Everything had changed.”

Her youngest of four children was nearing the end of high school and Puzey’s marketing career had been uprooted. “The empty nest really makes you question your purpose,” she said. “And I didn’t even have the job anymore to stabilize me.”

After years in the corporate world, Puzey struggled with a job search while her dream role kept tugging at her. “I had never had a problem getting a job, but suddenly I couldn’t land anything. I kept thinking, what is happening right now?”

In the building her dad built

In the meantime, the building that houses A Lettered Home had sat empty for 12 years. “My dad could not make a decision about what to do with it; it just sat,” Puzey said. One day, her father said he was going to put it up for sale.

“I told my husband, OK, decision’s made. Dad’s going to sell it, so I’m not going to do anything in it.’”

She said her husband looked at her and said, “OK. But in one year, when your dad has not done anything to either sell it or rent it out, you’re going to open a bookstore.”

Puzey said she laughed it off. But one day, almost without realizing it, she said, “Let’s just go start cleaning out the shop.”

That’s how this bookstore’s story began to unfold.

Puzey needed to shed the building’s industrial image, including remnants of a sound booth and speaker mounts from the stereo shop.

“I started getting a vision in my mind of what it could be,” she said. She imagined the aesthetic of academia with dark wood, leather and artwork. The vision included drawing on the experience she had with the original A Lettered Home: an Etsy shop she opened more than a decade earlier selling vinyl lettering. The family owned an industrial printer used to make wall hangings known as “word art,” along with oversized art. She planned to incorporate all of it into the shop.

But the universe seemed determined to test her resolve. Puzey’s couch order was canceled repeatedly for months. Her new printer disappeared into supply chain limbo. Even her tried-and-true vinyl machine suddenly refused to work.

“I remember putting my hands on the machine and saying, ‘OK, this is ridiculous,’” she said. “Everything that shouldn’t go wrong was going wrong. You start thinking, ‘Am I supposed to be doing this? Am I not supposed to be doing this?’”

But then her last child flew the nest – and it turned a whole new page. “I got more done in the six weeks from the time he left until the time I opened, than I had in the previous six months,” she said.

A simple model

A Lettered Home operates on a simple model: People can buy used books or bring in their own to trade for store credit – half off another book. If Puzey doesn’t think a book will sell, she’ll take them for a 25-cent book sale held in the parking lot with proceeds given to the Mid-Columbia Reading Foundation.

Beyond books, the site also operates as a small print shop – an essential part of Puzey’s vision for serving the West Richland community and beyond. She invested in professional‑grade equipment so customers can order high‑quality prints, custom stationery and other paper goods that fit naturally within the bookish atmosphere. The service grew out of her long‑standing interest in design and crafting.

When someone asked Puzey what her “end game” was for a small store where most items sell for $5 or less, Amber didn’t hesitate.

“This is my end game,” she said. “I am doing everything I have ever been interested in. Everything that has ever been a hobby or a love is encapsulated in this.” Her sincerity is palpable. “I get to be around books all day. I get to read when I’m not busy. I get to talk to people about books – which is my favorite thing ever. I get to have book clubs. I get to host bookish craft nights. People come in and say it’s peaceful. That’s what I wanted.”

Book clubs are welcome to host their discussions in her store for free and she charges just $25 an hour to use the space for a party – with tables and chairs for up to 15 people.

Puzey is proud to have opened the store without loans, using money she had saved from substitute teaching and her Etsy shop. Community support, library sale racks and a West Richland bibliophile who gave Puzey upward of 1,000 books, all carried her through the soft opening and grand opening. “That woman can have any book she wants forever,” she laughed.

It’s not just friends and family who showed up – West Richland showed up. And that, she said, is the whole point of this chapter.

“I grew up on this very soil,” she said. “I just want to give a little something back. We don’t have a lot of pretty spaces in West Richland; I’m hoping that’s changing. I feel like the community is becoming more community‑minded.”

A Lettered Home is her offering toward that shift, but hardly the end of the story.

A Lettered Home: 5335 W. Van Giesen St., West Richland; 509-416-6230; aletteredhome.com. Hours: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday; 10 a.m.–5 p.m. Friday and Saturday.