Full Circle Books
Albuquerque's Feminist Bookstore on Silver SE, 1973–1999

Last verified May 2026 · Original research by Josh Eldred

The founding: Santa Fe, 1973

Full Circle Books was founded in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1973 by Kate Arnold. The founding was not accidental or casual. Arnold came from a family already embedded in the feminist publishing world. Her mother, June Arnold, had co-founded Daughters, Inc. in 1972 — one of the earliest independent feminist publishing houses in the country, responsible for publishing experimental and avant-garde feminist literature that mainstream houses would not touch. When Kate Arnold opened a bookstore in Santa Fe the following year, she was extending a family commitment to getting feminist writing into the hands of women who needed it.

The timing matters. In 1973, the feminist bookstore movement was still in its earliest stages. A handful of women's bookstores had opened across the country — Amazon Bookstore Cooperative in Minneapolis, A Woman's Place in Oakland, ICI: A Woman's Place in New York — but the network that would eventually include more than a hundred such stores was just beginning to form. Full Circle was among the first wave, and it remained one of the oldest continuously operating feminist bookstores in the United States for the duration of its existence.

The feminist bookstore movement in context

To understand what Full Circle Books was, you need to understand the movement it was part of. In the early 1970s, feminist and lesbian literature was effectively invisible in mainstream bookstores. The major trade publishers were slow to publish women's writing that dealt explicitly with feminism, reproductive rights, sexuality, domestic violence, or lesbian identity. Independent feminist publishers — Daughters, Inc., Diana Press, Persephone Press, Naiad Press, Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press — were producing the books, but mainstream distribution channels largely ignored them.

Feminist bookstores solved the distribution problem by creating their own retail network. These were not bookstores that happened to carry some feminist titles alongside general inventory. They were bookstores whose entire reason for existing was to make feminist, lesbian, and progressive literature available to the women and communities who needed it. Most were run as collectives or cooperatives. Most were small. Most operated on thin margins and relied heavily on volunteer labor. And most understood themselves as activist institutions, not merely retail businesses.

The network was connected by Feminist Bookstore News, the trade publication founded by Carol Seajay of Old Wives' Tales in San Francisco after the first Women in Print Conference in 1976. That conference, organized in part by June Arnold herself, was a landmark event in the movement — the moment when feminist bookstore owners, publishers, printers, and distributors began coordinating nationally. Full Circle Books, with its direct family connection to June Arnold and Daughters, Inc., was woven into this network from the beginning.

Kate Arnold and the transition to Paula Wallace

Kate Arnold ran Full Circle Books through its initial years in Santa Fe. In 1978, Paula Wallace purchased the store. Wallace had her own roots in the feminist bookstore world — she had worked at A Woman's Place in Oakland, California, alongside Carol Seajay, and the two had planned to open a women's bookstore together in San Francisco. Wallace went to New Mexico instead and bought Full Circle. Seajay stayed in San Francisco and went on to co-found Old Wives' Tales and to launch Feminist Bookstore News.

Under Wallace's ownership, Full Circle Books moved from Santa Fe to Albuquerque, settling at 2205 Silver Avenue SE — the address where it would remain for approximately twenty years. The Silver SE location placed the store in the University of New Mexico area, close to the campus, the surrounding student neighborhoods, and the broader progressive community that lived in the central part of the city. It was a deliberate choice: the UNM area had the concentration of readers, students, faculty, and activists who were the store's natural audience.

The location: 2205 Silver Avenue SE

The Silver SE address became synonymous with Full Circle Books in Albuquerque. Silver Avenue runs east-west through the neighborhoods south of UNM's main campus, and in the late 1970s through the 1990s, the area around the university was Albuquerque's center of progressive and countercultural activity. The neighborhood was dense with bookstores, coffee shops, co-ops, and small businesses that served the university community and the broader population of politically engaged residents who lived nearby.

Full Circle Books was a small store, as most feminist bookstores were. It did not have the square footage of a general-interest independent or the sprawl of a chain. What it had was depth in its chosen subjects, and that depth was the entire point. A customer walking into Full Circle was not browsing a broad selection in the hope of finding something interesting. She was walking into a store that had been curated, from floor to ceiling, to serve a specific set of needs that no other bookstore in Albuquerque was serving.

The broader bookstore landscape of Albuquerque during this period included general-interest independents like Living Batch in Nob Hill and Page One Books in the Northeast Heights, but none of those stores carried feminist and lesbian literature with the depth or intentionality that Full Circle did. It was the only store of its kind in the city, and for many of its customers, it was the only store that mattered.

What Full Circle stocked

The inventory at Full Circle Books reflected the range of the feminist bookstore movement itself. This was not a store that carried a few shelves of women's studies alongside general fiction. The entire inventory was organized around feminist, women's, and progressive concerns.

• Women's studies and feminist theory. The academic and intellectual core of the collection. Full Circle carried the foundational texts of second-wave feminism alongside newer work in feminist theory, gender studies, and critical race feminism. For UNM students and faculty working in these areas, the store was a resource that the university bookstore could not match.
• Lesbian literature and LGBTQ titles. Full Circle was one of the few places in Albuquerque where lesbian fiction, nonfiction, and poetry were available in significant depth. The store carried titles from Naiad Press, Firebrand Books, Spinsters Ink, and other lesbian and feminist publishers whose output was almost entirely absent from mainstream bookstores.
• Progressive politics. Labor history, anti-war writing, environmental justice, Indigenous rights, immigration, civil rights — the political shelves at Full Circle reflected a broad progressive worldview that connected feminism to other movements for social justice.
• Poetry by women. Small-press poetry collections, chapbooks, and anthologies. Full Circle supported women poets in a way that general-interest bookstores did not, carrying work from presses like Kitchen Table, Eighth Mountain, Calyx, and Crossing Press.
• Health and reproductive rights. Titles on women's health, reproductive rights, domestic violence, sexual assault, self-defense, and related subjects. Full Circle was known in Albuquerque for the depth of its holdings on sexual assault in particular.
• Children's books with feminist and anti-bias perspectives. Non-sexist, multicultural children's literature was part of the inventory, serving parents and educators who wanted alternatives to the mainstream children's book market.
• Journals, zines, and periodicals. Small-circulation feminist periodicals, literary magazines, and political journals that were available only through feminist bookstores and direct subscription.

Community activism and the store's role beyond retail

Full Circle Books was an activist institution. Like most feminist bookstores, it served as a community center, a meeting space, a bulletin board, a resource library, and a gathering point for women's organizations, LGBTQ groups, reproductive-rights advocates, and progressive political campaigns. The staff — which over the years included Anne Frost, Helene Vann, Elli Elderbroom, and Alice Trabaudo, among others — were part of the broader activist community that the store served.

Readings, book groups, discussion events, and organizational meetings were part of the store's regular programming. For many women in Albuquerque — particularly lesbian women and women involved in progressive politics — Full Circle was a known safe space in an era when such spaces were fewer and harder to find than they are today. The store's function as a community institution was inseparable from its function as a bookstore. The books were the reason the space existed, but the space was the reason many of the relationships and organizations in the community could function.

The UNM connection

Full Circle's proximity to the University of New Mexico was central to its operation. UNM's Women's Studies program (now Gender and Sexuality Studies), the English Department, the History Department, and other humanities programs generated a steady flow of students and faculty who needed the kinds of books Full Circle carried. Faculty assigned texts that were available at Full Circle and nowhere else in Albuquerque. Students discovered writers at the store that their courses had not yet introduced them to. Graduate students doing research in feminist theory, women's history, or LGBTQ studies used the store as an informal research library.

The relationship between Full Circle and UNM was symbiotic. The university generated the readership; the bookstore provided the inventory. When that inventory included titles from small feminist presses that the university bookstore did not carry and that interlibrary loan could take weeks to deliver, Full Circle was performing a function that no other institution in Albuquerque could replicate. For anyone now working with New Mexico women's history collections, understanding that Full Circle was the primary retail channel for academic feminist publishing in Albuquerque during these decades is essential context.

Why Full Circle closed

Full Circle Books closed in early 1999, after approximately twenty-five years of operation. The closure was reported in the book-trade press as the loss of one of the oldest and largest feminist bookstores in the country.

The reasons were the same reasons that closed feminist bookstores across the United States during the 1990s, and they were cumulative rather than singular. The rise of chain bookstores — Borders and Barnes and Noble — pulled general readers away from independents of all kinds, but feminist bookstores were particularly vulnerable because their customer base was already narrow and their margins were already thin. The early growth of online bookselling, beginning with Amazon in 1995, began to erode the advantage that feminist bookstores had as the only retail source for small-press feminist titles. And the mainstreaming of some feminist literature — the fact that Barnes and Noble now carried a women's studies section, however shallow — reduced the urgency that had driven customers to specialty stores in the 1970s and 1980s.

There were also internal dynamics common to the feminist bookstore movement. Stores run on collective models with heavy reliance on volunteer labor faced burnout. The political tensions within feminism itself — around race, class, transgender inclusion, and other axes of difference — sometimes played out in bookstore communities in ways that were painful and divisive. And the economic reality was simply that selling books from small presses to a specialized audience in a mid-sized city was never going to be a financially sustainable enterprise over the long term without some form of subsidy or institutional support that most feminist bookstores never had.

By 2001, only seventy-four feminist bookstores remained in the United States. By 2010, the number was far smaller. Full Circle's 1999 closure was part of a wave that swept the movement it had helped to build.

How Full Circle books appear in Albuquerque estate libraries

I encounter books from Full Circle Books regularly in Albuquerque estate work. Twenty-five years after the store closed, the generation of women who were Full Circle's core customers — UNM faculty, community activists, feminist organizers, progressive professionals who lived in the university area — are aging, downsizing, and in some cases passing away. Their libraries are transitioning, and when I walk those libraries, the Full Circle provenance is often immediately apparent.

The pattern is recognizable. A household with concentrated holdings in women's studies, feminist theory, lesbian literature, and progressive politics, heavy on small-press titles from publishers like Naiad, Firebrand, Spinsters Ink, Kitchen Table, and Crossing Press — that household was almost certainly a Full Circle customer. When I also find a store stamp or sticker inside the front cover confirming the source, the provenance chain is complete.

Visible markers that signal Full Circle Books provenance:

• Full Circle Books stamp or sticker on the inside front cover or rear endpaper, typically bearing the store name and the 2205 Silver SE address. Stamps from the era tend to be small ink impressions in purple or black ink.
• Bookmarks, event flyers, and reading-group lists tucked between pages. Full Circle produced printed materials for events and reading groups, and these ephemera sometimes survive inside books for decades. They are worth preserving — they document the store's programming and community role.
• Penciled bookseller pricing on the rear endpaper. Full Circle carried some used titles alongside new inventory, and older volumes may have penciled price marks in the antiquarian-bookseller tradition.
• Inscriptions referencing the store or its events. Some books carry inscriptions noting that they were purchased at Full Circle or at a reading event hosted by the store.
• Customer ownership marks. Some longtime Full Circle customers wrote their names on flyleaves — a habit of careful, bibliographically conscious readers. These marks do not reduce value. They confirm the household's connection to the Albuquerque feminist literary community.

Provenance markers and authentication

For anyone working with first-edition identification or provenance documentation, Full Circle Books stamps and stickers are part of the Albuquerque bookstore provenance landscape. The store stamp — when present — establishes that a book entered an Albuquerque household through a specific, identifiable retail channel during a known period (late 1970s through early 1999). For signed or inscribed copies, the stamp can help corroborate that the signature was obtained locally rather than through a dealer or auction.

Full Circle provenance is particularly relevant for titles from small feminist presses. Many of these titles had limited print runs, and copies that entered Albuquerque through Full Circle were part of the feminist bookstore distribution network — a network that was separate from mainstream book distribution and that functioned as the primary channel for getting feminist publishing into the hands of readers. A Naiad Press title with a Full Circle stamp is a book that traveled through that specific distribution network, and for collectors of feminist publishing history, that chain of custody has meaning.

When I encounter these markers during an estate assessment, I document them. They are part of the book's history, and removing or obscuring them reduces the book's value as a historical object.

What estate libraries with Full Circle provenance commonly contain

Households that were regular Full Circle customers built libraries with a distinctive character. If you are clearing such an estate, here is what to expect and what to handle with care:

• Foundational feminist texts in early editions. The Second Sex, The Feminine Mystique, Sexual Politics, Against My Will, This Bridge Called My Back, Sister Outsider, The Color Purple — often in first or early trade editions, often well-read but intact. These are not rare books in most cases, but early printings of landmark titles have steady collector interest.
• Lesbian fiction from small presses. Naiad Press, Firebrand Books, Spinsters Ink, Tallahassee-based publishers. Many of these titles are now out of print, and some have developed collector followings. Do not assume that paperback fiction from unfamiliar publishers is without value.
• Poetry by women in chapbook and small-press editions. Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Joy Harjo, Mary Oliver, Judy Grahn, Pat Parker, Minnie Bruce Pratt — often in small printings from presses like Kitchen Table, Calyx, Eighth Mountain, or Crossing Press. Poetry chapbooks are the most commonly overlooked category in estate libraries, and some of these carry meaningful resale value.
• Women's health and self-help titles from the 1970s and 1980s. My Bodies, Myself in early editions; titles on reproductive rights, domestic violence, and sexual assault that were central to the feminist movement and that Full Circle was known for stocking deeply.
• Academic feminist theory. bell hooks, Judith Butler, Gloria Anzaldua, Chela Sandoval, Gayatri Spivak, Patricia Hill Collins — often with marginal annotations from readers who were engaging with these texts professionally or intellectually. Annotated copies from identifiable scholars can have institutional interest.
• Southwest and New Mexico women's writing. Leslie Marmon Silko, Joy Harjo, Denise Chavez, Ana Castillo, Luci Tapahonso — often in first editions, sometimes signed at local readings. These titles connect Full Circle's inventory to the broader landscape of Albuquerque literary bookselling and Southwest authorship.

Advice for clearing an estate with Full Circle provenance

1. Do not strip stamps, stickers, or ownership marks. They are part of the book's documentation and part of its value as a historical object.
2. Do not discard small-press paperbacks without checking. Many of the titles Full Circle carried were from publishers with limited print runs. A Naiad Press paperback that looks like a mass-market romance may be a collectible out-of-print lesbian novel.
3. Look at the poetry shelf carefully. Chapbooks are easy to mistake for pamphlets or booklets and discard. They are often the most-overlooked-and-valuable category in a feminist library.
4. Check for signed or inscribed copies. Full Circle hosted readings and events. Books signed at those events may carry signatures from authors whose work has appreciated significantly since the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s.
5. Preserve ephemera. Bookmarks, event flyers, reading-group lists, and other printed materials found inside books are primary-source documents about Albuquerque's feminist community. They have historical value independent of the books they were found in.
6. Consider institutional interest. The University of New Mexico's Center for Southwest Research, women's studies archives, and LGBTQ archives may have interest in collections with documented Full Circle provenance, particularly if the original owner was a known figure in the Albuquerque feminist or academic community.

Why this page exists

Feminist bookstores were infrastructure. They were not merely retail businesses that happened to sell feminist books — they were the distribution network, the community center, the safe space, the gathering point, and the institutional memory of a movement. When they closed, the infrastructure they provided was not replaced by anything equivalent. Barnes and Noble's women's studies section was not a substitute for a store staffed by activists who knew the literature, knew the publishers, knew the community, and understood why every title on their shelves mattered.

Full Circle Books operated in Albuquerque for twenty-five years. It served a generation of women, students, scholars, and activists. Its books are now showing up in estate libraries as that generation transitions. Documenting the store's history — its founding, its inventory character, its community role, and the provenance markers its books carry — is part of preserving the cultural record of a movement that mattered and of a city that was served by institutions it did not always appreciate while they existed.

If you are holding a book with a Full Circle Books stamp inside the front cover, that stamp is a thread connecting the book to a specific store on Silver Avenue SE, a specific movement in American feminism, and a specific era of Albuquerque's intellectual and activist life. For most books, the connection is incidental. For some, it is part of why the book matters. Either way, it is worth a moment of attention before the book is processed as just another paperback. The other bookstores in Albuquerque's history each left their own marks, but Full Circle's is distinctive — a mark of feminist commitment in a time and place where that commitment carried real weight.