Not long ago, I launched my newest book at an independent bookstore that has become a refuge for an author adrift in the savage upheavals of the publishing world.

Copper Cat Books can be found along a sun-bleached Henderson, Nevada, strip mall featuring burger joints and nail salons. Yet owner Wendy Marcisofsky’s shop, found right there on the end, beams with genuine warmth and klieg-light energy. With Wendy, there’s just more substance.

For me, Wendy is an inspiration. The other day, I arranged my book table next to her spot at the cashier’s desk, where Wendy offered moral support as I offered my latest project to the world. I have run the gamut of peddling books across Nevada and California, where I hawked to bookstore denizens like a homeless man soliciting change. Rarely, if ever, did I leave feeling sated.

But it’s different at Copper Cat. Under Wendy’s eye, the event was like a holiday cocktail party. I was surrounded by friends and colleagues I’d met during my decade in Vegas as a newspaper correspondent. Like the ex-homicide cop, the retired U.S. District Attorney, magazine editors, news reporters and the former wise guy I’d profiled during my newspaper days.

Weeks in advance, Wendy advertised the event on YouTube and Facebook and placed promotional posters in her store—all part of her roll-the-dice mentality to promote literature and literacy. The day before the launch, I sat on the comfortable back-of-the-store couch for an on-camera interview to discuss my newest book and work in general for nonfiction enthusiasts who couldn’t make my event.

Thanks to Wendy’s hustle, customers lined up to buy—not just one—but all three of my books. Who does this kind of thing anymore? Well, Wendy does. Growing up in rural Vermont in the 1960s, she was an avid reader who has carried that passion into adulthood.

Still, these days, Wendy is struggling. Buried in debt after her husband Anthony’s costly open-heart surgery, she has fallen behind on her rent. She recently launched a GoFundMe drive help dig herself out of the kind of hole you find yourself in when you’re a proud underdog selling books in a tourist town blinded by the seven deadly sins.

For me, Wendy’s bookstore is worth saving. She’s a human lighthouse, beckoning to battered wayfarers like me—book authors tossed amid in a ruthless storm of numbers-driven PR agents and publication houses.

Wendy loves books. But she also has a soft spot for her husband, Anthony. Theirs is a storybook marriage whose prologue came decades ago in New York after she’d placed a personal ad in a local PennySaver—describing herself as a normal 32-year-old nonsmoker with no kids.

They met at a Burger King after work. She thought, “He’s not gonna go for me.” But he did. The two talked until the Burger King closed and Anthony asked her to a matinee that week. They eventually got married.

As it turned out, they had lots in common. They liked cats. Both were devoted readers—he preferred fiction; she liked nonfiction. They eventually settled in Las Vegas, not exactly a reading paradise. Wendy was a trainer for a software company; he was a line chef working for various restaurants on The Strip. The couple envisioned one day opening their own bookstore, a dream whose time had not yet come.

Meanwhile, Anthony studied to become a long-distance trucker. Just days after he earned his Commercial Driver’s License in 2005, he won a lottery to purchase a 1986 rig in cherry condition. “I remember the day he came around the corner with that truck looking like a kid with the best toy he ever had,” Wendy recalls.

Anthony babied that truck, feather-dusting it daily. He called his new company Copper Cat Transport because the rig was copper-colored with a big Caterpillar engine. He took Wendy on road trips and encouraged her to join him as a tag-team driver. But big rigs were not Wendy’s thing.

By 2017, diesel was becoming expensive and, after receiving some inheritance money, Wendy and Anthony were ready to buy their bookstore. They found an end-unit with lots of windows along a busy four-lane thoroughfare in suburban Henderson.

The former children’s crafts and tumbling space would soon become their clean well-lighted book space. “We stripped it down to the concrete and made it ours,” she recalls. They bought an initial inventory of a few thousand books from the estate of a collector in nearby Pahrump. They started out as a used bookstore and were drawn to eclectic fare, such as a 16-volume set of encyclopedias dating back to the 1790s.

Why not name the store after Anthony’s prized long-distance rig?

Wendy has always had this thing for books, treating them like orphans without a home. In time, she accumulated 61,000 inventoried books the couple keeps in a warehouse in nearby Boulder City—a collection that helped Wendy launch a unique book-finding service not offered by most independent bookstores.

She’s developed a network of 500 clients searching for out-of-print or hard-to-find books, acting on tips as vague as “I once read this book as a kid about a gorilla.” She just can’t say no.

One hunt involved a man who wanted to gift his wife with a book she’d read as a child: Follow My Leader, by James B. Garfield, published in 1957, about a blind boy who gets his first seeing-eye dog. When she received the request, Wendy smiled. “I knew that book!” she recalls. “I’d also read it as a child.”

When she located a copy, she notified the husband, who asked her to present the gift to his wife—who cried on the spot. But it’s more than just adults in Wendy’s literary flock. Her store teems with suburban mothers and their reading-aged children.

One day, she met a mother who was encouraging her teenage son to take up reading. Wendy suggested a youth series called The Last Apprentice, by Joseph Delaney, about a teenager who protects people from supernatural threats. The mother soon returned to report that her son was hooked and purchased the entire set. That woman had tears in her eyes, too.

Still, running an independent bookstore in Sin City is not for the faint of heart: “Sometimes, I feel doomed. Then I’ll think of another idea to bring people in.”

She has partnered with local schools to attract young readers and sponsors pet adoptions and Spin-the-Wheel Mondays for seniors for gift certificates and lower prices. She also hosts an acoustic guitarist who plays on Friday afternoons. Customers use her couch space free of charge for discussion groups.

“Books aren’t meant just to be sold and read in solitary,” she says. “They’re meant to be talked about and shared. And a bookstore would offer that opportunity.”

And of course, Copper Cat Books hosts writers like myself — scores of them. With some, Wendy actually rolls out a red-carpet with ribbon-cutting ceremonies. And customers have responded to Wendy’s efforts. “What a wonderful little bookstore! This makes my bibliophile heart sing!” one wrote on the store’s Facebook page. And another: “In these times where bookstores are going or have gone extinct, they are doing a great job staying in business.”

Despite Wendy’s financial woes, she has a lot of be thankful for. Anthony is on the mend after his expensive open-heart surgery. “He’s my million-dollar man,” she says. “But to me, he’s priceless.”

Wendy is even at work on her own book — one that tells a story about, well, Wendy just being Wendy.

Not long ago, she spotted a young skateboarder in front of her store, making precarious four-foot leaps over a retaining wall into a parking lot below. When she went outside, the kid said, “I suppose you’re going to boot me out.”

“No,” Wendy replied. “I just want to make sure nobody bothers you.”

Then she stood by and cheered as the teen, after several wipeouts, finally landed a nifty jump move onto the parking lot. “Woohoo!” Wendy shouted. “Do it again!”

As it happened, the skateboarder’s friend posted a video of the encounter, which garnered a million views on TikTok, under the tag, Skateboard Granny. Now Wendy is at work on a children’s book, The Legend Skateboard Granny.

It’s a story about a woman who goes her own way and chases her own dreams. It might as well be called The Greatest Little Bookstore Owner in all of Sin City.

The Greatest Little Bookstore in Sin City

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