One Cincy Bookstore Crawl stop is hiding a dragon

• The annual crawl, Oct. 2-4, will send readers crisscrossing Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky to 27 independent bookstores — including some shops and neighborhoods they might otherwise never visit.
• For Snapdragon, that's especially meaningful: The shop is filling what its owners see as a bookstore void in the neighborhood.

Zoom in: Snapdragon itself feels a little like stepping inside a storybook.

• Bill and his wife, Andrea MacFarland, transformed a 1932 home on Bridgetown Road — most recently used as a computer repair business — into a room-by-room literary adventure.
• There's a colorful children's room, a horror/sci-fi/fantasy room and a basement "dungeon" complete with a dragon cave that Bill and his daughters helped build.

Adding to the lore: Bill says tunnels running through the basement, now home to the dragon, date to the house's bootlegging days.

Flashback: The couple had no bookstore or business experience when Bill floated the idea in early 2024. He was an elementary school teacher, while Andrea studied photography.

• They toured 14 locations before finding the property and opened Snapdragon in July 2025.

The plot twist: The not-yet-open bookstore managed to snag a spot in last year's crawl anyway — and the weekend changed his perspective on the business.

• Readers poured in from across the region, leaving shelves looking, as MacFarland puts it, "like a herd of locusts came through."
• More importantly, the crawl brought people to the West Side who might not otherwise have ventured there.
• "It's not a dead zone," he says. "We've got stuff going on here."

More on the bookstore crawl … Snapdragon's location and hours.