AN INDEPENDENT QUEER BOOKSTORE
Our stories belong in our hands.
Purple Hand Books is building a thoughtful home for LGBTQ+ literature—stories that help us recognize ourselves, remember our history, and imagine freer futures.
Books for every part of queer life
We are curating fiction, romance, memoir, history, poetry, graphic novels, young adult and children’s books by and about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, nonbinary, queer, and other underrepresented people.
Find yourself
Stories with room for joy, complexity, discovery, love, family, and becoming.
Know the history
Books that preserve the people, movements, and hard-won moments that brought us here.
Share the shelf
Thoughtful picks for readers of every age—and for anyone ready to listen.
A bookstore should do more than sell books. It should help a community keep its stories.
Our name remembers the Friday of the Purple Hand, when queer people in San Francisco turned an act meant to silence them into a visible symbol of resistance.
The shelves are being built
We are preparing our catalog and fulfillment system carefully so that the books shown here are genuinely available and your order experience is reliable. The shop will open after that work is complete.