Matt Wixon and William

/ Courtesy of Kyle Burk

Matt WixonCourtesy of Kyle Burk
Matt Wixon and WilliamCourtesy of Kyle Burk
Matt Wixon and his son WilliamCourtesy of Kyle Burk

Matt Wixon, owner and founder of Bookstore Movers and partial owner of Capitol Hill Books, died on March 22, two years after he was diagnosed with colon cancer. He was 41 years old.

Wixon leaves behind his wife, Kate, and a 2-year-old son, William. He also leaves behind a community of friends, fans, and fellow readers at the D.C. institution that has been the nexus of his social and work lives since he moved to the city in the early 2000s: Capitol Hill Books. Loyal customers from across the city frequent the much-loved independent used bookstore, which is full to the brim with teetering stacks of paperbacks. The bookstore is a staple of the neighborhood, and Wixon had fiercely loved and championed it since he first started working there in 2004. “It’s a temple, a sanctuary,” he told the Washington Post about the place in 2011.

Wixon owned the store with his three best friends, Aaron Beckwith, Kyle Burk, and Shantanu Malkar. In July, the four men bought out the famously (and lovably) grumpy Jim Toole, who had owned the store for 23 years.

“Matt was … he’s maybe the most amazing person I’ve ever known,” says Burk. “Extraordinarily charming, generous, and funny. He wasn’t a poet exactly, but his heart was.”

The poetry was evident in many ways, Burk says—Wixon’s sense of humor, his easy way with words, the way he consciously and conscientiously lived his life with kindness. “He was amazing, just great at making people feel like they mattered. I just often had the thought that he was a better person than me. He was so much better at being nice to people,” Burk says.

Wixon, Beckwith, and Burk met about 15 years ago, when they all took jobs canvassing for environmental causes in the city. They worked as canvassers together for only a few months, and then Beckwith took a job at Capitol Hill Books, a tiny bookstore in a rowhouse owned by a curmudgeonly former Navy admiral named Jim Toole. Wixon took a job there next, as a shelver, and Burk after that. Malkar would hang out there, too.

The men worked on and off at the store at various times, but even when they weren’t employed there, they spent a lot of time at Capitol Hill Books, hanging out with one another and with Toole, who became a kind of mentor and a friend to them all. As the years wore on and the neighborhood around their beloved literary cocoon began to change, the men made a plan to save up enough money to eventually buy the bookstore from Toole, when he was ready to retire.

Short on the capital necessary for such an enterprise, the three started a t-shirt company, selling shirts with slogans that said things like “Guantanamo Bay: Come for the beaches, stay for the waterboarding.” (“That didn’t work,” Burk laughs).

Then, Wixon started answering Craigslist ads requesting moving help. There was something he enjoyed about the physical labor: the concreteness of the task, the idea of helping someone end one chapter and start another one. “You’re there at the beginning of a new job or a breakup of a marriage or when someone is moving in with their partner. You see the kids in a divorce upset because they’ll never see the dog again,” he told the Post about his company. “There are no right words there—you just try to be a comforting presence. You have to be the one thing going according to plan.”

Bookstore Movers, named in homage to the store Wixon was trying to save up to purchase, got its unofficial start in 2005, and was officially incorporated in 2009. The company now has somewhere around 90 employees, Burk says.

In December 2016, as the company was growing and Wixon’s wife was seven months pregnant with their son, he got the cancer diagnosis. He had been feeling ill and having stomach pains, and his doctor suggested he might have hemorrhoids, Wixon told Georgetown University Medical Center. He insisted that the doctor perform a colonoscopy, and at age 39, two weeks before Christmas, he received a diagnosis of stage 4 colon cancer.

“To say it’s devastating is an enormous understatement,” Burk says. The diagnosis stunned them.

Wixon started undergoing chemo. In 2017, his son was born. In 2018, he and his three best friends were finally in a position to purchase Capitol Hill Books. Luckily for them, Toole was also ready to retire. (“We’ve been expecting them someday to buy me out and send me off into the sunset. I’m getting old,” Toole told DCist last summer).

In an interview with The Hill is Home from almost exactly a year ago, Wixon spoke about his cancer diagnosis and how it had drastically altered his life and the way he ran his moving company. “Chemo has been tough, but I have every intention of beating this,” Wixon said. “I’m still working long hours and focusing on spending time with my young son, so here’s hoping I can win this fight.”

Wixon loved reading obscure dictionaries and hardboiled mystery novels and fantasy and sci-fi. He had the widest vocabulary of anyone Burk knew. He had a wry sense of humor, and a habit of sending long, florid responses to even the most mundane email chains discussing plans for dinner, Burk says. He and Beckwith have an archive of the best emails saved.

One of the last things Wixon asked Burk and Beckwith to do was sit with him and tell him stories, “just about things we’d done and what we were going to do, our plans,” Burk says. “We’re going to try to keep telling those stories to each other, and we’ll keep telling our stories about Matt.”

One of those stories, Burk says, is this: “Matt was a person who loved. One of the things that made him heroic was that he knew how difficult life could be, how tragic it could be, how even sometimes boring it could be, and in spite of all that he always loved people … He lived with unbridled enthusiasm, and he did it more creatively than anyone I knew.”

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