Gail Lichtenfels operated Epic Book Shop for five decades in three downtown YS locations. Over those years, she cemented herself as a village institution, and her store as a place that welcomed those who were curious. Here, Lichtenfels is pictured in her Dayton Street location in the early aughts. (Submitted photo)
Remembering Gail Lichtenfels— A life in pages
- Published: September 26, 2026
Since her mother died in August, Hypatia McLellan has been finding Gail Lichtenfels in the places she left behind. Sometimes, she’s waiting between the pages of books.
Across five decades as the owner of Epic Book Shop, millions of words passed over and through the shelves of Lichtenfels’ shop; along the way, she added some of her own through the journals she kept. As McLellan, who turns 30 this year, has begun sorting through her mother’s belongings, journals from the 1970s and ’80s have disclosed themselves, peering out from the stacks.
“I just opened one from 1982, and it said, ‘I’m turning 30 this year,’” McLellan said. “I was like, ‘You’ve written this for me.’ … “So now, when I miss her, I open up a journal like it’s a novel.”
Lichtenfels died Aug. 6, at the age of 74, at Friends Care Community. Her death followed almost two decades of treatment for multiple myeloma, a period of remission after CAR T-cell therapy in 2024 and, more recently, a diagnosis of acute myeloid leukemia.
But as Lichtenfels’ family told the News this month, illness was just one chapter in the story of a life that always reached outward — toward books, of course, but above all, toward questions.
Lichtenfels in front of her original Xenia Avenue location in the ‘80s. (Submitted photo)
“She was always fascinated with the meaning of life, I think,” McLellan said.
It was the kind of deep fascination that filled both Lichtenfels’ shelves and her days, and it entwined with the village where she built her life. Having grown up in nearby Enon, she spent a lot of time in Yellow Springs — particularly at Epic Book Shop, which had been opened in 1966 by an Antioch College student and, by the time Lichtenfels graduated from Greenon High School in 1970, was owned by Bob Devine. She started working at the book shop around the same time.
“She came to Yellow Springs, I think, mostly just to kind of get out of Enon,” McLellan said.
A few years later, barely out of her teens, Lichtenfels bought the bookstore for $1,000. As she told the News last year, when she retired from decades behind the counter at Epic, in the early days she wrote her goals for the store in a journal.
“The first one was to read every book,” she said. “Nowhere did I mention making money.”
In the early 1970s, Lichtenfels said, Epic was the only bookstore within 20 miles, and I-675, which would eventually offer a quicker route to Dayton, was still in its nascency. Epic’s stock was diverse in its early days: it included tobacco and records before Dingleberry’s opened down the street, and eventually expanded to things that were, at the time, less ubiquitous in the village’s downtown retail spaces: yoga supplies, tarot decks and what Lichtenfels called “exotic body products,” including Weleda skincare and Burt’s Bees products.
“Those things weren’t mainstream yet,” McLellan said. “But she loved unique things, and she really originated a lot of things that are now sold all over town.”
Lichtenfels’ broad range of interests made Epic dynamic, her family said — and they also pulled her briefly away from Yellow Springs. In her early 20s, Lichtenfels went to San Francisco, where she worked at City Lights Bookstore and nannied for a Yellow Springs family that had moved west. Friends and family tended to her shop while she was gone. After about a year, McLellan said, her mother missed her bookstore and came home.
Over the decades that followed, Epic’s stock transmuted as Lichtenfels’ own curiosity metamorphosed: philosophy, feminism, Eastern religion, mysticism, psychology, yoga, astrology and children’s books. She earned a master’s degree in philosophy from Wright State University, taught philosophy at Wright State and the University of Dayton and taught yoga to adults and children. Her niece, Jade Wolfe, was once among her students.
“Everybody has that one aunt who really influences them,” Wolfe said. “For me, [Lichtenfels] was not only that — she was my first philosophy professor.”
Wolfe and McLellan said a lot of customers knew the Gail who was poised and soft-spoken behind the counter. But there were other facets to her, too, and all of them were real.
“I’d say, if you didn’t know her well, she was a little bit more quiet and reserved, a little more demure, sophisticated,” Wolfe said. “Behind closed doors, I would say she was dynamic.”
McLellan added that her mother was, to some degree, an introvert — and so she’s been struck since Lichtenfels’ death by how many people have told her Gail was one of the first people who made them feel welcome in Yellow Springs.
“She took a little bit of warming up sometimes, but everybody has said she was so welcoming,” McLellan said.
Gail Lichtenfels reopened Epic Book Shop at 229 Xenia Ave. as a used bookstore in 2014 after closing the longtime Dayton Street bookstore in 2009 (News archive photo by Megan Bachman)
To that end, Wolfe pointed out that Lichtenfels, having arrived in town from Enon, had not been born into one of the village’s multigenerational families. She started to make her mark on downtown Yellow Springs in the 1970s amid the advent of a number of women-owned downtown businesses — Ohio Silver in 1971, Molladoor in 1975, The Winds in 1977 — and put down her own roots. Epic, Wolfe said, became a place where other folks who arrived from outside could begin to do the same.
Wolfe said she remembers shelves where queer and feminist studies, classic literature, occult texts, spirituality, the Bible and “A Course in Miracles” could all occupy the same room. Subjects that could be countercultural or taboo, she said, were offered without much concern for contradiction.
“When you see all of those things in one place, you immediately feel safe, because likely you identify with one of those things,” Wolfe said. “To wander into a place where you might already feel like an outsider, and you see these things … I think that was kind of an extension of Yellow Springs itself.”
McLellan said the conversations Lichtenfels had with customers at Epic often started with books, and then moved beyond into the headier stuff of life and its essence, and the unseen things that flow between. She said she remembers hearing customers tell her mother their life stories and, sometimes, talk through spiritual questions. McLellan’s father is a therapist, and she said that, at a young age, she saw her parents’ work as providing similar services for the folks they encountered.
“I remember being a kid and thinking, ‘She’s a therapist, too,’” McLellan said.
Lichtenfels also kept her shop a community gathering space by hosting community events, especially for up-and-coming authors to promote their work via readings and book signings. And Lichtenfels put her curiosity about life and the world around her into action by providing space for spirituality and study groups, including the long-running “A Course in Miracles” group, which continues today, run by Lichtenfels’ friend Joe Cimoch.
“Sometimes almost every night of the week she would have a group meet at the shop,” McLellan said.
At home, Lichtenfels was funny, dry and prone to bouts of whimsy. She gave the family dogs voices and carried on whole conversations through them in accents. She held onto McLellan’s toys after she was done playing with them and made small tableaux in shadow boxes. Over the years, purple and mermaids became a kind of shorthand for Lichtenfels, particularly after Epic moved to Dayton Street in 1996 and incorporated the Mermaid Cafe.
“When she liked something, she went all in,” Wolfe said, and added that she remembers an earlier visual vocabulary, before the mermaids. As a child, she spent considerable time in the old Epic and in the attached apartment where Lichtenfels lived. Wolfe remembers wandering through the vacant restaurant space that had previously housed The Winds next door, after the restaurant moved further down Xenia Avenue. Upstairs, Lichtenfels’ apartment was filled with stained glass and mandalas — geometric designs meant to embody the universe, and created with spiritual guidance in mind. Mandalas hung in the windows of the store, too.
Gail Lichtenfels and her daughter, Hypatia McLellan, returning to Epic Books’ original location after more than a decade. (Submitted photo)
McLellan said she found a number of mandalas among her mother’s files — the “purple files,” she called them —- which included McLellan’s own childhood artwork.
“She kept every piece of art I ever made, including ones that were really not worth keeping,” McLellan said with a laugh. “She was an archivist, I guess you could say.”
“The mandalas were there before the mermaids,” Wolfe added. “But then that dissipated, and she pivoted.”
When Epic moved to Dayton Street, the mermaids arrived in full force, including a giant purple mermaid sign behind the cafe counter. Purple, McLellan and Wolfe agreed, had always been there. Wolfe worked at the store — “All of my friends at some point worked in the bookstore,” she said — and remembers that she and friends would sometimes wait until the downtown bars closed and open Epic’s doors to late-night patrons.
“We’d do great sales, with everyone leaving the bars in the middle of the night, and I’d say, ‘Who wants muffins? Coffee?’” Wolfe said. “Gail would come in the next morning and say, ‘How do I have $200 in here?’ And I’d be like, ‘It was great last night!’”
“She wanted to keep the book culture alive in town,” McLellan added.
“I think she succeeded,” Wolfe said.
Yellow Springs once had five or more bookstores running simultaneously, each with its own niche, and Lichtenfels didn’t view them as competition — to her mind, they made the town’s literary tapestry richer. In 2014, she told the News she hoped the village might again become a destination for readers.
“I would love to see Yellow Springs become book central,” she said.
But keeping her own piece of that book culture alive came with its share of challenges. Epic closed its Dayton Street location in 2009 amid declining sales and Lichtenfels’ health problems, then returned five years later as a used bookstore in a third location, abutting Kieth’s Alley, where MAZU restaurant is now. In a bit of Yellow Springs synchronicity, while Lichtenfels operated Epic at its third location, McLellan began working at Wildflower Boutique, which initially opened its doors in Epic’s original space.
Through the years, Lichtenfels supplemented her shop by teaching and selling rare books online. McLellan said journals going back decades contain recurring worries that the store was not making enough money. Still, Lichtenfels kept finding a way.
“She was so determined to have that bookstore,” Wolfe said. “It was her dream life.”
In 2025, after having returned Epic to its original location at 232 Xenia Ave. and more than half a century tied to Epic, Lichtenfels passed the torch to Kathy Engisch, who opened Tesseract Books last summer where Epic had been. As Engisch wrote in a letter to the editor this month, Lichtenfels shared her years of knowledge with Engisch, giving advice on distributors, but also contributing her abundant book stock to Tesseract.
“The inventory has behaved like a Mary Poppins-style trick,” Engisch wrote. “No matter how many individual boxes I open up and take to the store … there doesn’t seem to be any reduction in the number of boxes I still have.”
With the Epic chapter closed, Lichtenfels headed into a retirement that would only last for a year. Just weeks before she died, McLellan said, her mother was still making plans.
“I want a garden, I want to read, I want to get more dogs,” McLellan remembered her saying.
After a month of treatment at the James Cancer Hospital in Columbus this summer, Lichtenfels told her family she wanted to come back to Yellow Springs.
“We basically jail broke her out of the hospital and drove her back to Yellow Springs,” McLellan said.
They brought Lichtenfels to Friends Care Community, where McLellan works, and where she said, in her mother’s final days, friends streamed in to see her. McLellan said she and her family are grateful for the way her mom was swathed in love and care by the nursing staff at Friends Care.
“She had the best ending to a really shitty situation,” McLellan said. “I think she had some really peaceful days there. … Everybody at Friends said, ‘This is the most visitors I’ve ever seen.’”
McLellan said that, on the drive from Columbus back to the village and toward Friends Care, they passed 232 Xenia.
“There’s your store,” McLellan told her mother.
Lichtenfels, nearly asleep in the car, lifted an arm and acknowledged her arrival in town, pumping her fist in the air.
“Just the notion of being back in town,” McLellan said. “She was so happy to be back.”
A memorial for Gail Lichtenfels will be held Saturday, Sept. 26, beginning with a welcome at 1 p.m., at Vernet Ecological Center in Glen Helen Nature Preserve. Friends and family will share reflections at 2 p.m., and an open mic for loved ones to share stories and memories will begin at 2:30 p.m. A post-service gathering will be held from 3–4 p.m.
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