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It’s raining in downtown Bellingham. I should be in English class, but I already read the assigned novel the class is plodding through, and I already thought all the thoughts I wanted to think about it.

I take the bus downtown and get off at the stop between two used bookstores.

Henderson’s is the new one. The smell of fresh wood shelves mingling with spine glue. Maze of narrow aisles more convoluted the further back you go. Romance novels in German and French all the way at the back. Ladders up to the ceiling. Everything perfectly organized.

But it’s Michael’s I go into first, and I don’t know how much time goes by in those musty, cluttered rooms. Shelves haphazardly labeled, contents don’t match the signs. Stacks of cloth-bound books without jackets on the floor. This is where I know I’ll find buried treasure.

The store owner, Michael himself, tells me the magazines are free. I rifle through the box on the counter, then stuff two issues of Parabola into my backpack. Pilgrimage from 1984. Trickster from 1979. Both over ten years old by the time I find them.

Those magazines cracked my world open. Coming across an old stack of Parabola magazines was one of my first clues as a young person that my spiritual path could be something more than the ticket to heaven my Evangelical upbringing taught me.

Parabola is where I met Allan Watts and then Mary Oliver. Cynthia Bourgeault, author of The Wisdom Jesus. I donated all my copies to the Arcosanti library when I moved there two decades later, wondering who would find them next and what quests they might inspire.

This week I was searching up publications that might want to feature reviews of Susan L. Herrmann’s Breaking Up with the Patriarchy. For the first time in admittedly quite a while, I thought of Parabola again.

The website is a blank white screen. The store pages show 404 errors. Gone since April of last year.

I did some internet forensics on the Wayback Machine. Only about 25% of Parabola’s archives were ever digitized. I can find exactly one full issue available online — the one from 2017 that features Cynthia Bourgeault.

Almost everything I read is digital these days. I used to travel by bus and bicycle a lot, so I was delighted when I got my first e-reader — dozens of books in the palm of my hand instead of half a dozen or more weighing down my backpack. And think of the trees, right? The nearest printer I can use now is over 30 miles away, and that’s fine.

But the loss of Parabola is hitting me hard. I’m afraid to look up what other old publications have gone defunct too.

I love it when authors tell me about hearing from readers who had their worlds opened up by finding their books lying around — in waiting rooms, on friends’ shelves, in libraries. Those accidental discoveries changed people’s lives, the way Parabola changed mine.

We still print books. But the unorganized shelves at Michael’s, that state of receptive exploration, wandering through ideas, open to whatever you found… That’s not so much the norm anymore.

Now we find books when searching for specific topics online. We find them linked in our social media feeds, and the algorithms are not random.

So how will your book be found by that specific person who needs it? Skipping school on a rainy day, thinking there must be more to spirituality than that ticket to heaven?

Serendipity can still happen. But it’s no longer enough to publish a beautiful book and trust it will find its way. When the readers who need a book most are searching at 2am, when algorithms decide what surfaces and what stays buried, the books we love have to be ready to meet those readers where they’re already looking.

That’s what Open Spiral is here for.

Open Spiral is a small imprint, which means each book gets the kind of care findability actually requires. A title that speaks the language already in a reader’s head, a subtitle that makes the promise unmistakable, a presence built carefully enough that the right person can stumble into it, even now.

The books here are for readers who know there’s more to the conversation than the loudest voices are letting on.

If you’re a writer wondering where your book belongs, whether you’re early in the process or holding a finished manuscript, we would love to hear what you envision for your book, for your readers, and what you would like becoming an author to open up for you.