If this was the opening scene in a film instead of a simple newspaper story, the camera might quickly find a young couple slowly sipping from their glasses of wine, quietly discussing their day, clearly content to be there for a while.
The surprise would come in Scene Two, when a sweep of the room reveals it to be a bookshop — not a pub or a restaurant, but a bookshop — and a perfect place to begin this real-life miniseries that will continue to unfold this week in Tucson.
Meet Lizzy and Crispin Jeffrey-Franco and welcome to Stacks Book Club, which on Tuesday will open a second local location, at 2920 E. Broadway, just west of Country Club Road.
Owners Crispin and Lizzy Jeffrey-Franco sit in their new location for Stacks Book Club at 2920 East Broadway. The bookstore and cafe will open on Tuesday, May 26.
Like its namesake in the Oro Valley Marketplace, the new bookstore will double as a coffee shop in the morning and triple as a beer-and-wine bar in the evening.
And like the store in Oro Valley, it promises to become a busy place.
People are also reading…
“Almost since the day we opened, we’ve had customers asking if we might do something down here in Tucson,” Stacks co-owner Lizzy Jeffrey-Franco said from the new location. “They liked what we were doing — they liked coming up to our store — but for a lot of people we were just a long way away.”
Consider that problem solved.
Many genres and books for all ages will be available at Stacks Book Club, 2920 E. Broadway. It's the second location for Stacks Book Club; the original is in Oro Valley.
Not only is the new Stacks store in the heart of midtown, many Tucsonans have been there before.
From 1959-2006, it was the home of Austin’s Ice Cream, a much-beloved hot spot where families gathered on all our hot summer days.
“I can’t tell you how many people have told us they came here all the time as kids,” Jeffrey-Franco said. “We wanted to revitalize the space, but we wanted it to feel familiar, too. We tried to expose some of the elements that spoke to its history, to what it was before.”
Owners Lizzy and Crispin Jeffrey-Franco hang the portraits of some of their favorite authors above the book desk inside their new, second location of Stacks Book Club. The new store and cafe open Tuesday at 2920 E. Broadway.
The effects work well, from the red brick walls behind the bookshelves to the unfinished concrete floors.
The new Stacks store is almost twice as large as the one in Oro Valley, with floor space approaching 4,000 square feet. Seating capacity will also be larger, hours will be later, and there will be some 6,000 books on the shelves when the store opens Tuesday morning.
“We’ll have more, eventually, but we want to see what kind of books our customers here will be looking for,” Jeffrey-Franco said. “This isn’t Oro Valley. This is midtown Tucson, so it will be fun getting to know a whole new group of people.”
Owner Lizzy Jeffrey-Franco says the 2920 E. Broadway location is twice the size of the original Stacks Book Club in Oro Valley.
The Jeffrey-Francos aren’t totally new to the neighborhood. While growing up in Oro Valley, Lizzy would sometimes visit the Reid Park Zoo. As a baseball player at Marana High, Crispin knew the way to Hi Corbett Field. Still, there’s been a lot to learn.
“It’s been great fun to explore, since we’re both so new here,” Lizzy Jeffrey-Franco said. “One thing we saw right away: We’re in the middle of a big, busy neighborhood now. Thousands of people drive by every day. We’re just hoping some of them see there’s a bookshop here now.”
If the Jeffrey-Francos were the couple in our opening scene, the bookshop was the Changing Hands Bookstore on Camelback Road in Phoenix, one of the first in Arizona with a coffee, beer and wine bar in it.
Besides books, hats, earrings and other items will be for sale at Stacks Book Club, 2920 E. Broadway.
It was there they found community. It was there they first began shaping their dream of owning a bookshop themselves one day.
“We’d always loved spending time in bookstores, even when we traveled,” Lizzy Jeffrey-Franco recalled, “but Changing Hands just felt different. From our perspective as customers, the café was such a perfect complement to the books … and we felt so much at home there … we began to talk about opening our own store, and what it might look like.”
Several years later, the pandemic gave them time to consider the prospect in earnest.
“There was a lot to think about, a lot to work through,” Jeffrey-Franco said. “The coffee, book and bar elements are like running three businesses at once, and we didn’t know a whole lot about any of them.
"The pandemic gave us time to develop a business plan, educate ourselves about the industry, and learn more about our market.
Eric Wilyat, barista, practices his latte art at the second location of Stacks Book Club, 2920 E. Broadway.
“It was scary. We didn’t have any big fancy backers or anything. I even kept my day job, just in case, but we were lucky. Things seemed to go pretty well right from the start.”
Stacks opened in July of 2023, and the coffee shop quick became a popular stop on Oro Valley’s drive to work.
The book business has grown steadily as the store began filling its nighttime calendar with book clubs, discussion groups and release parties.
Most visibly, Stacks has established itself as the No. 1 stage in Southern Arizona for live author events.
Last week alone, Stacks welcomed sellout crowds to appearances by Matt Dinniman on Wednesday and Elsie Silver on Friday.
“Author events have become an important part of who we are,” Crispin Jeffrey-Franco said. “Our readers want to meet authors, and we want them to do that all year round. Having the second store will help us do even more.”
Speaking of the new second store, Stacks’ Broadway location will open Tuesday morning, May 26, at 7 a.m. Store hours will be from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. Sundays through Thursdays, and 7 to 11 Fridays and Saturdays.
Footnotes
- Tucson Spotlight, the Tucson Tome Gnome and the Pima County Public Library are again partnering to offer a Summer Reading Club for adults this year. Beginning June 1, readers can grab book trackers and bingo cards at any branch library. Book lists can be found at library.pima.gov. To see prize lists and learn more, visit tucsonspotlight.org.
- The Rio Nuevo District played a key role in the Stacks Broadway project, providing half of the hard build-out costs for the space. “We couldn’t have done this without them,” Lizzy Jeffrey-Franco said.
- Longtime Tucsonans who remember Austin’s Ice Cream may also remember two long-ago bookshops that were also in Broadway Village. Coyote’s Voice closed in the early 1990s. Footprints of a Gigantic Hound later moved to East Fort Lowell Road, where it became Clues Unlimited.
- January Gill O’Neil, the 2026 poet in residence at the University of Arizona Poetry Center, will be featured in a reading scheduled for Thursday, June 4, at 7 p.m. at the Poetry Center. For more, visit poetry.arizona.edu.
