Trident Booksellers & Cafe

Trident traces to a Boulder, Colorado bookshop founded by Hudson and Janet Shotwell, who opened a Halifax location on Argyle Street in 1992 as a sister store combining bookselling, coffee roasting, and tea. That original Boulder shop still operates today. The Halifax branch moved to its current Hollis Street address in 2000, and the Shotwells ran it until their retirement in 2015, when the business passed to Tracy Stevens. Three decades on, the shop still functions as both a specialty coffee roaster and a used bookseller in one downtown room, with a stock built around literature, philosophy, theory and criticism, and general oddities rather than bestseller-driven inventory. Craft-roasted coffee and loose-leaf teas are served at a counter that shares space with the secondhand shelves, and the shop doubles as a neighborhood events venue. Unlike many combined book-café concepts that treat the coffee as an afterthought, Trident's founding model paired the two trades from day one — roasting and bookselling as parallel, equally weighted businesses under one roof, a structure inherited unchanged from its Colorado origin and still intact after three ownership-era changes.