When Shane Logan visited West Palm Beach’s Rainbow Bridge bookstore in 2020, he considered it “the most magical and incredible bookstore” he’d ever been to. Over many return trips to the shop—which was filled with antiquarian and esoteric tomes—he befriended the owner of Tamas Burger, who had been running it since 1972.
When the bookstore’s plaza sold to new owners in March, Burger decided it was time to pass the torch to someone who could reinvigorate the store. Over the past four years, while attending college full-time, Logan had been investing what he earned working as a valet at Buccan—and had racked up enough to be that person.
Together with his girlfriend, Ava Zywczyk, Logan spent the summer moving the bookstore into its new home at 801 Lake Avenue in downtown Lake Worth Beach. The Dancing Elephant, as it has been renamed, opened in August. “We’ve been super busy ever since,” Logan says. “The community is really tight and very eclectic.”
Though The Dancing Elephant inherited thousands of books on spirituality, astrology, philosophy, the occult, and metaphysics from Rainbow Bridge, Logan also added fiction, art, architecture, and history titles with the goal of turning the shop into “the best metaphysical bookstore in the country.”
“People really don’t understand why I would buy a bookstore when it is becoming less common to read, but I sincerely think that the greatest opportunities are always where no one is looking,” Logan says. “My vision is for the store to be around for another 50 years.”