Boulder Bookstore Is My Jam

But Trident, Well It’s Got Soul

There’s a bookstore in Boulder that doesn’t flash its name across every guidebook or glossy lifestyle feature. But for those in the know, Trident Bookstore and Café is the gravitational center of something deeper. Something older. Something a bit more soulful.

It’s the other bookstore in town—the quiet revolutionary vis-à-vis the more curated, tourist-trafficked Boulder Bookstore just down the street. If Boulder Bookstore is the well-dressed intellectual, Trident is the barefoot philosopher in a worn wool sweater, quoting Rumi between sips of oolong.

I found myself back there again recently, navigating the narrow path between rustic book stacks and handmade wooden tables. As always, it was full. Not just with people, but with presence. You don’t simply “visit” Trident. You negotiate for a seat like a Taoist monk negotiating with the Way. There’s a sacred rhythm to it: wait patiently, hover intuitively, and when the universe provides you a prompt, you slip in and claim your spot.

Founded in 1979 and now fully employee-owned, Trident is more than just a quirky cafe-bookstore hybrid. It is the very embodiment of Boulder’s eclecticism, its quiet resistance to chain-store blandness, its unspoken yearning for rooted community in a world that’s moving far too fast.

You won’t find corporate efficiency here. But there is something better: imperfect beauty. A kind of lived-in sacredness that invites reflection, creativity, and spontaneous conversation with strangers who suddenly don’t feel like strangers.

Trident Bookstore and Cafe

A Café That Feels Like Home

I ordered a latte from a barista who looked like he’d been teleported straight from a Kundalini retreat, and sat at a wobbly table on the back patio—the kind that makes you feel like life itself is precariously balanced, but you’re strangely okay with it.

There’s something about Trident’s outdoor seating that pulls you into the moment. The wooden benches, the smell of coffee mingling with incense, the light buzz of laptop keys and whispered poetry readings. A place where tattoos, Tibetan malas, and Patagonia fleece collide. It is a sanctuary for the seekers, the scribblers, the skeptics, the wanderers.

Books as Portals, Not Products

This time around, I found myself pulled toward books that have followed me like trusted companions through many seasons of life:

Chungliang Al Huang and Jerry Lynch’s Thinking Body, Dancing Mind—a Taoist approach to high performance that I first discovered in the 90s. I picked it up again and felt the old currents stirring—its reminder that flow is a felt state, not a forced outcome.

Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Wherever You Go, There You Are—which taught me years ago that you can’t outrun yourself, no matter how many cities you move to or jobs you change. Its sand-colored cover felt like a welcome mat saying: welcome back.

William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, a book that, even in its age, still dares to ask the big questions without trying to spoon-feed the answers. I thumbed through its pages like a mystic re-reading old prophecy.

And then, in the food section near the wall, J. Kenji López-Alt’s The Food Lab glimmered with the alchemical promise of better home cooking. A reminder that even the sacred can be sautéed.

Trident’s Quiet Rebellion

What makes Trident powerful is not what it tries to be but what it refuses to be. In a time of hyper-productivity and curated self-images, Trident invites you to get lost. To linger. To leave without buying anything and still feel like you’ve received something real.

Its employee-owned model is a quiet act of economic resistance. It doesn’t sell the dream of exponential growth. It nourishes the dream of equitable ownership, creative autonomy, and philosophical space for people who need more than a just a career ladder.

The Tao of Trident

When I sit inside Trident, I’m not just surrounded by books—I’m surrounded by possibilities. The kind that can’t be scheduled, optimized, or monetized. The kind that comes when you least expect them like a smile from a stranger, or a phrase from a book that rearranges your DNA.

In a town known for tech, wellness, and wealth, Trident is the sacred countercurrent. It doesn’t posture or perform. It breathes.

And every time I leave, I’m reminded of something I once read in a Taoist text:

“The sage does nothing, yet nothing is left undone.”

Trident does nothing flashy.

And yet, it holds everything.

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