03/13/2026
New chapter for a longtime Eugene bookshop: Black Sun will be renamed Outliers
Avatar photo
BY ANNIE AGUIAR
10 hours ago
QuickTake:
Black Sun owner Peter Ogura is hanging it up after decades at the helm of the independent south Eugene bookstore. New owner Kel Weinhold says she has thought for about 20 years that she’d like to someday buy the store. She plans a few changes, including a new name.
Peter Ogura has spent most of the last 34 years in the same spot: behind the front desk of south Eugene’s Black Sun Books, nestled into a corner of a cozy storefront teeming with theory, history and fiction titles from floor-to-ceiling shelves.
But sunset is approaching. Ogura, 71, will retire from the independent bookstore later this month. Next month, it will become Outliers Books, dedicated to stocking marginalized writers with a renewed focus as a third space under new owner Kel Weinhold.
Ogura, who has been considering stepping back over the last five or six years, said that he’s grateful for years of chatting about books with his well-read customers.
Peter Ogura stands between the shelves in his bookstore, Black Sun Books. He is retiring after close to 34 years running the store. Credit: Annie Aguiar / Lookout Eugene-Springfield
“I’m pleased that over 33 years that I’ve not been asked to carry books that I don’t want to carry,” he said. “No one has asked me for romances.”
Weinhold’s Outliers Books will focus on bringing in undersung authors in different disciplines. (There will also be a romance section, focused on q***r, Black and brown love stories.) But she said the Black Sun Books collection — rife with humanities-driven titles to fit a literary, university city like Eugene — has laid much of that groundwork.
“There’ll be voices that come in that aren’t here, but there’s a lot of those voices already here,” she said. “That’s one of the things that I really respect about this bookstore. Find me a bookstore that has as much Japanese in translation, Spanish in translation, and voices of Black, indigenous, q***r authors in the fiction section.”
Advertisement
