About Us

Our Story

Dianna and John have been married for 27 years and have five children. They are lucky to have a house full of children, books, and music – and they hope to bring the same warmth of their discussion-full, book-piled, song-filled living room to the bookshop.

Dianna’s seed of a dream to run a bookstore was planted when she was a child. Her love of books started with the earliest memories of her parents reading her Little Critter and Berenstain Bears books at her bedside at St Christopher's hospital while she recovered from heart surgery at five years old. Later, on days home sick from school, her Dad would arrive home from work with a handful of Archie comic books to raise her spirits. This turned her into a comics book collector who would clean off the top shelf of her closet, cozy it up with fluffy pillows and warm blankets, and hoist her box of comics up there to read for hours with a flashlight. Her family also had a tidy bookshelf with a treasured beautiful set of New Book of Knowledge Encyclopedias that she and her siblings would pop off the shelf to fill up with facts on a whim. Then, when Dianna’s Mom took her over to the library to get her first library card, the world of creative novels and endless nonfiction to feed her mind opened up. She would borrow books from both the school and township libraries, drag a chair from the front porch, place the chair legs between the intricate tangly root system under the shady tree next to her home and read in solitude for as long as deliciously possible.

Dianna’s first real feeling of total freedom harkens back to when she passed her driver’s license test and drove to the library in solitude. She remembers looking back at the pile of newly borrowed books in her backseat and taking in a deep, long breath of pure joy.

When Dianna met her perfect match, John, in community college, they began to share fun, nerdy pursuits like watching The Learning Channel and buying and reading masses of used books from the basement of the library. Soon, John’s homemade bookshelves began to overfill, and Dianna’s room became overwhelmed with piles of books in each corner and on every surface. John built Dianna a well-crafted bookcase to house the books…and in 1999 Dianna and John decided to join their book collections (and themselves!) in a wedding with tables assigned by Shel Silverstein poems. They spent lots of time together visiting new and used bookshops everywhere they traveled, soaking up the unique character of each store as they went. In 2024, they celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary in the book village of Hobart, NY and read on the cozy front porch at the Wind in the Willows between book hauls.

John and Dianna created five wonderful children together, and they are so fortunate that they got to read each of them to sleep at night. Now that the kids are older, Dianna and John ecstatically enjoy watching them pursue their individual passions and engagement in life-long curiosity. The kids have offered enthusiastic support for our new bookshop endeavor, and we can’t wait to reveal their book recommendations to you on our shelf-talkers!

🍃That lovingly planted seed of passion-for-books has now grown fully into The Shady Tree & Tangled Root Bookshop. We welcome you to find a spot upon its tangled roots, sit under its shade with us, and breathe in the sheer bliss of a book.

We do not use AI for our writing or images: Photo by Dianna on 8/7/24 at Wind in the Willows.