Michigan town comes together to help one of their own move a mountain of books
3. May 2025
Chelsea, Michigan — In the Southern Michigan town of Chelsea, which has a population of about 5,000, the local bookstore has quite a story of its own.
It’s a story that began when Michelle Tuplin, owner of Serendipity Books, decided to relocate her business to larger space.
“I knew it was going to be great,” Tuplin told CBS News.
But she didn’t know how she was going to transport about 9,000 books to the new space a few blocks away.
“The actual logistics, the details, not so much,” Tuplin said.
Of course, she could have carried them all. But moving that many book boxes would have been challenging to say the least. She could have hired a hero with a truck, but that was cost-prohibitive.
So how then did she hope to move all those volumes to their new homes? With a kind of bucket brigade, but with books instead. Making it work would require a good chunk of the town to volunteer.
“Well, that was the math thing that I never quite figured out,” Tuplin said of how many people would need to show up. “…So I thought, OK, we’ll just ask for help, cross our fingers, and hope for the best.”
So, it was with that blind faith that Tuplin showed up to move her bookstore last month and found enough volunteers to stretch the whole route twice over: two lines made up of more than 300 volunteers.
“It was overwhelming,” Tuplin said.
For those of us who can’t even get close friends to help with a move, this defied logic. But Chelsea residents say they were craving something that day, community. In our divided country, here was a gathering that was neither a rally nor a protest.
“All generations, all together, working toward something,” one of the volunteers said of the experience.
“And exactly what life, I think, should be,” said another.
As for Michelle, she says it restored her faith in humanity.
“I think there’s a basic trust that people are generally good. And that was massively emotional.”
