The Pike Place Market storefront 30 feet below the Public Market sign has sold books since 1961. It still does.

Pine Books, the sixth bookstore to occupy the space at 1501 Pike Place, took shape after owner Tiffany Brost closed Lionheart Bookstore in March 2025 and remodeled.

The Seattle Times profiled the store on Monday, Sept. 7, tracing the storefront's unbroken bookselling lineage back to Rita Dyke's Books. Brost had quietly taken over Lionheart's operations from David Ghoddousi roughly three years before the rebrand, running the shop under its old name while she learned the business.

Brost, a former lawyer who stepped away from practice to raise her children, said she realized bookselling was what she wanted when she re-entered the workforce. She started asking around to see if any Seattle bookstore owners were thinking of retiring. When she heard Ghoddousi was planning to step aside, she took over.

"I kept the store as it was because I wanted to feel things out a little bit," Brost told the Seattle Times.

Ghoddousi was a Pike Place legend. According to the Pine Books website, he sang, recited poetry and told jokes to everyone who walked in during his more than 25 years running Lionheart.

The remodel was modest: new flooring, better lighting, a fresh coat of paint and a perch for Colby, Brost's 8-year-old Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. The original 1960s shelving stayed. Workers stripped paint from the storefront's large timber beams to expose the old wood.

The lineage of the space reads like a miniature history of Seattle bookselling. Rita Dyke opened her shop in 1961. Her son Rod Dyke renamed it Collector's Bookstore, then moved it elsewhere in the market and rebranded as Golden Age Collectables, which still operates and bills itself as the oldest comic book store in the world. Ed Leimbacher followed with MisterE Books, a mystery specialty shop. Then came Lionheart, which held the space for the entirety of the 21st century until March 2025.

The woman-owned shop stocks every Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction going back to 1918 and every Booker Prize winner since 1969, along with international award winners translated from Japanese, Arabic and other languages, according to the Pike Place Market vendor directory. The store also carries children's books, poetry, philosophy and local history.

Brost told the Seattle Times that customers have surprised her. Despite the market's tourist traffic, shoppers skip the airport-bookstore fare. Philosophy sells well. Poetry sells better than she expected. During summer 2026, Dostoevsky was a strong seller.

Pine Books also ran a World Cup book bracket competition during summer 2026. Six booksellers each picked one book from the visiting World Cup nations playing in Seattle and matched them head to head. Argentina won, with "Tender Is the Flesh," a dystopian horror novel by Buenos Aires author Agustina Bazterrica.

Pike Place Market now has six independent bookstores: BLMF Literary Saloon, Chin Music Press, Golden Age Collectables, Lamplight Books, Left Bank Books and Pine Books. Pine Books is open daily at 1501 Pike Place #432, in the Lower Levels. Take the ramp by City Fish Company.