Located at 2114 Market Street in the Ballpark District, The Shop at MATTER is a Black and woman-owned independent bookstore, design consultancy, and letterpress workshop serving “designers and other thinking persons in community.” That phrase isn’t branding fluff. It’s a mission.

Owned by partners-in-all-things Rick Griffith and Debra Johnson, MATTER operates with a radical clarity of purpose. Rick, a British West Indian immigrant born in London to parents from British Guyana and Trinidad & Tobago, and Debra, born in Omaha with primarily British and Czech ancestry, built MATTER around the belief that joy and love are acts of resistance.

And that belief shapes everything on the shelves.

Curated With Intention

Everything in The Shop at MATTER is there for a reason. Each title has been made or chosen with care. The focus is on works by Black, Indigenous, Brown, and Queer intellectuals — voices often sidelined in mainstream retail environments.

You won’t find every bestseller here. That’s intentional.

Instead, MATTER prioritizes books that expand perspective, deepen conversation, and transform minds and hearts. For more mainstream titles, they encourage customers to use their Bookshop.org portal, which supports independent bookstores nationwide.

Book Clubs That Actually Matter

MATTER’s book clubs are anything but passive reading groups.

The MATTERbeta Book Club invites participants to select advanced reader copies sent by publishers, read them for free, and report back as beta readers. It’s community-driven curation in action.

The Book Club to Remake the World hosts rotating activists for conversations that bridge critical thought and lived experience.

There’s also a Silent Book Club for introverts, and “The Book Club that Really Should Meet at a Bar,” curated by Rick and often followed by a drink at Pon-Pon.

These aren’t just gatherings. They’re laboratories for dialogue.

Printing Truth to Power

Behind the bookstore sits the Printshop at MATTER — home to presses dating back to 1895.

Workshops include beginner-friendly one-day letterpress intensives, half-day poster workshops, and hands-on bookbinding classes. The studio houses a 1915 Hacker Poco, an 1895 C&P Platen, a Vandercook 22, and dozens of wood and metal type cases.

But the equipment is only part of the story.

The Printshop exists to “print truth to power,” offering lectures, seminars, and collaborative workshops exploring critical theory, technology, race, economics, and art.

A Different Kind of Retail

Calling The Shop at MATTER strictly retail doesn’t quite capture it.

It is part bookstore.
Part studio.
Part classroom.
Part community center.

And in a time when algorithms often decide what we see and read, MATTER insists on human curation, conversation, and love as the organizing principle.

In the Ballpark District, that is what matters.

Watch our Shop at MATTER reel here.