“Growing up, the Barnes & Noble manga section, not the beach or the swimming pool, was my favorite place to hang out,” said Shannon Liao, a reporter at the Washington Post’s Launcher, in a Twitter message. Pair that with a laid-back atmosphere and air conditioning, and you have the perfect reading locale. Once there, having all the options in front of you makes it easy to stay and read something new, especially if you’re a kid who is low on cash. “Every time there was a new volume of Bakuman, I would run to my nearest Barnes & Noble to read it,” Naomi Norbez, a longtime manga fan who frequented the store in their youth, told Polygon over Twitter. Unlike many of the novels sold at Barnes & Noble, serialized manga comes out every week. Over time, it has become mythologized as a destination for manga lovers to meet up, make friends, and, if they’re lucky, maybe even find love.

The imagery lures teens, making the manga section home to countless stories like Heather’s. On the shelf, they appear almost like encyclopedias, except with striking cover art of demons and boys with blue hair and large swords. Sometimes people read manga online using a digital subscription, but many fans still enjoy the feeling of holding a paperback copy in their hands. There is no “typical” manga story plots can feature anything from shonen, which often follow a hero on an action adventure, to the aforementioned shojo, a type of manga that often contains romance plots and depictions of everyday life. The term manga is a general term that refers to Japanese comics. On the outside, it looks just like any section inside a corporate chain bookstore, but the contents are special. This is the legacy of the manga section of Barnes & Noble. She fantasized, What would happen if I met someone in this very aisle? That’s when she started looking for love in the Barnes & Noble manga section. So she started dreaming about bumping into her imaginary crush while out shopping for books, similar to the stories that she used to read in her favorite shojo manga. When she finally entered high school, she thought she’d find the perfect guy - but no such boy arrived. She didn’t want anything too special, just a pretty boy who shared her interests.

When Heather was 13, she dreamed of meeting a boyfriend.

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