The Lost Art of Lingering

By Tela Kayne 

Why a bookstore, café and wine bar at Town at Trilith is betting on the oldest form of community there is. 

Somewhere along the way, we stopped lingering. We order ahead. We eat on the run. We work from home. Groceries arrive at our door, entertainment streams into our living room, and we can go an entire evening surrounded by hundreds of people online without actually being with anyone at all. 

Convenience has given us a lot. But it may have quietly cost us something too: the ordinary places where we run into one another. That’s the tension we set out to answer when we opened Scholar & Scribe at Town at Trilith three years ago. 

More Than a Bookstore 

From day one, the idea was never simply “bookstore plus library bar.” We wanted a place where a book could start a conversation, where a glass of wine or a pot of tea could slow an afternoon down, and where people could walk in without needing an occasion to be there. We wanted people to stay longer than they planned to and walk away with a new perspective, a new idea or perhaps even a new friend. 

Sociologist Ray Oldenburg had a name for spaces like this: “third places” as written about in his book The Great Good Place. Not home, not work, but the informal gathering spots in between — cafés, pubs, bookstores, libraries, barber shops, front porches — where community used to happen almost by accident. It’s a place to nourish sociability, foster a sense of belonging and revitalize the community. 

For generations, communities were full of them. They were cafés and pubs, bookstores and libraries, barber shops and front porches. In Europe, coffeehouses and literary salons brought people together over books, music, art, politics, food and drink. What happened inside these places wasn’t necessarily organized or scheduled. Often, their value was simply that people knew they could go there and find other people. Lately, in Fayette County, we’re seeing more local businesses lean back into that role — which is worth celebrating. A healthy community shouldn’t have just one place people belong. It should have many.

Why Books Still Do This Better Than Almost Anything 

Books have a unique ability to connect strangers. Ask someone what they’re reading and you instantly have something to talk about. Recommend a novel and you’ve revealed something about yourself. Put a group around a table to discuss a story, and strangers end up talking about faith, grief, ambition and how they see the world. Add food and drink, and something even older kicks in: hospitality. 

That’s why the different pieces of Scholar & Scribe — the bookstore, the Library Bar with its friends table, tea service, wine tastings, live music, author events, book clubs — were never meant to be separate business lines sharing an address. They’re different doors into the same idea. 

Some of that is programmed: an author visit, a wine tasting, a musician in the Library Bar. But our favorite moments usually aren’t scheduled at all — someone settles into a chair with a book and doesn’t leave for two hours, two strangers strike up a conversation at the bar, staff introduce two customers who turn out to have something in common. You can’t program those moments. You can only build a place where they’re more likely to happen. 

Lingering Doesn’t Scale — That’s the Point 

Across Trilith, there’s been growing conversation about human flourishing, and how the places we build either help people connect or quietly get in the way of it. Lingering is part of that conversation, and it’s wonderfully inefficient — it doesn’t fit neatly into an app, and there’s no express version of getting to know someone. Friendship takes time. Community requires repeatedly showing up. That’s precisely why these places feel increasingly precious. 

We built Scholar & Scribe because we believe books still matter, hospitality still matters and gathering around a table still matters. We believe communities are stronger when there are places where generations mix, ideas are exchanged, strangers become familiar faces and people have reasons to leave their individual worlds and enter a shared one. None of what we’re doing at Scholar & Scribe is new. In fact, that’s what we like about it. The future of community may look a lot like its past: a table, a book, something good to drink, a little music — and enough time to stay awhile. 

Scholar & Scribe is an independent bookstore, café and wine bar located at Town at Trilith in Fayetteville, offering book clubs, afternoon tea, wine tastings and live music through its Library Bar program. 

Tela Kayne is the co-founder of Scholar & Scribe, an independent bookshop and Library Bar at the Town at Trilith created around books, hospitality and community. She is also president of The Virtue Agency, a longtime marketing strategist, writer and author whose work has appeared on MarketWatch, Yahoo! Finance and other national publications.