Judging By the Cover bookstore opens new Tower District location

Judging By the Cover opened its new Tower District storefront at 617 N. Fulton Street, moving the Fresno bookstore from Chinatown into a building designed to hold affordable space for nonprofits and neighborhood businesses. The shift gives Ashley and Carlos Mireles-Guerrero a more realistic home after their first physical shop opened in Chinatown’s F Street Plaza Mini Mall and grew out of a business they launched online and as a pop-up in November 2023.

The bookstore’s path has been shaped by local support from the start. Its Chinatown location opened on Oct. 22, 2024, inside the Pop-Up Place project, which provided six months of free rent in a 500-square-foot space. The new Tower District site is larger and sits inside a 2,300-square-foot South Tower Community Land Trust building that is being positioned as a community-owned asset.

Community Vision said it invested $350,000 to support South Tower Community Land Trust’s acquisition and improvements at 617 N. Fulton. The building is planned to include four nonprofit office spaces, a community meeting room and a retail storefront, with Judging by the Cover Bookstore and San Joaquin Valley Free Clinic & Needle Exchange among the intended tenants.

Ashley Mireles-Guerrero said the Tower District had always been the goal, but the cost was out of reach until the partnership made the move possible. The bookstore’s GoFundMe campaign said the relocation was meant to make the shop more centrally located in Fresno, improve accessibility and expand community programming, including an ADA-accessible front door, larger literary and cultural events and more collaboration with Tower District partners.

The shop has become a gathering place as much as a retailer. The fundraising page says the bookstore has worked with more than 145 local authors and makers, hosted more than 250 free community events and built a Silent Book Club with more than 200 members. That mix of retail and programming has helped define the store’s identity in a city where independent businesses often struggle to keep affordable space.

The move also keeps the bookstore in the middle of Fresno’s debate over books, censorship and access. Ashley and Carlos Mireles-Guerrero started Judging by the Cover in response to Fresno County’s book-ban debates and centered BIPOC and LGBTQ+ authors from the beginning. Fresno County supervisors approved a children’s book review committee by a 3-2 vote in November 2023, the same month the bookstore launched.

Construction issues slowed the Tower District opening. Ashley Mireles-Guerrero said city approvals and an early air-conditioning problem pushed back the timetable, and part of the event space inside the new shop was still being finished. Even with the delays, the soft opening drew local residents who came out to support an independent business they had followed across Fresno’s changing neighborhood landscape.

The Tower District, which dates to the early 1900s as a streetcar suburb, has long been a place where commercial identity and neighborhood change meet. Judging by the Cover’s move adds a locally owned bookstore to that mix, this time in a building built to keep cultural space from slipping out of reach.