My Pandemic Visit To A Bookstore Nestled in An Alley

Feature Interview With Nina Barrett, Owner of the Evanston, Illinois Based Bookends and Beginnings

It was the fall of 2020 and the Covid-19 was still front and center on everyone’s minds. I elected to take advantage of a $49.00 one-way ticket to Chicago for a stay in my adopted hometown. And despite the restrictions, the visit certainly didn’t disappoint. 

One of my stops was in the town of Evanston. Located on Chicago’s North Shore lakefront, this tight-knit community of racial and cultural richness is home to Northwestern University, one of the top academic institutions in the nation. It was where in the summer of 1985 I spent three months on a healthcare administrative residency prior to completing my undergraduate senior year at The Ohio State University. 

Off of Sherman Avenue, the main arterial flowing through downtown Evanston is a small alleyway housing an eclectic bookstore known as Bookends and Beginnings. While in the Chicago area for another leg of the “Great Books, Great Minds Global Bookstore Tour,” I visited the store in the hopes of purchasing a book and meeting the store owner.

First came the purchase of Candace Taylor’s recent release entitled “The Overground Railroad.” Then as I was paying for the book, I asked whether the store owner was available for a quick hello. 

The store employee was kind enough to call to see if she was available. About five minutes later, a woman adorning an exquisitely well-fitted mask walked out to greet me

 “Hi, I’m Nina Barrett”

I asked if she would be open to a brief interview with me for a “Great Books, Great Minds'' feature article. To my surprise she said, “sure, why not.” 

She seemed grateful for the opportunity to briefly share, offering a rich overview of the bookstore’s genesis and evolution. 

“With the support of my husband, Jeff Garrett, an internationally recognized expert on rare and specialized library collections, we opened Bookends & Beginnings in June of 2014,” she said with her voice slightly muffled behind the mask. 

On the heels of that encounter, we decided to do a more in-depth interview by phone when I arrived back in Denver about the store’s history, pandemic response, and expansion efforts. Here’s what she had to share: 

Take us for a moment back to the early history of this location 

Prior to us taking over the space, it housed an Antiquarian bookstore known as “Bookman’s Alley.” For many years it had quite the cult following of fans who loved the store. In fact, in the novel “The Time Traveler's Wife” which was a huge bestseller before being made into a movie, there’s actually a scene where the fictional characters in that book go to “Bookman’s Alley.” 

That’s interesting. What’s the backstory of this? 

The author of the book Lynn Niffenegger just loved the store and used to hang out here a lot. So she wrote the owner of the store into her novel under his own name and had the fictional characters come shopping there because that is what you would do with a great afternoon in Evanston. 

So how did you eventually acquire the store? 

When Bookman’s Alley went out of business at the end of 2013, the owner liquidated. Everything was taken out of the store. So I chose to start “Bookends and Beginnings” from scratch rather than purchasing his business. 

Why the decision to go in that direction? 

Honestly, I was not interested in being in the Antiquarian book business. My desire was to focus on new books. 

Have you had any Bookman’s Alley bookstore customers stop by to reminisce? 

We have. Because there’s the legacy of people knowing that store for such a long time, to this day, six years later, we continue to have people coming in saying, “Oh, I haven’t been back here since it was Bookman’s Alley.” So it’s still bringing people in. 

What’s that experience been like? 

I wanted to kinda honor the vibe Bookman’s Alley had created here which is why you’ll see the space outfitted with oriental rugs and antique furniture. And we’ve been able to maintain a bit of that rustic feel, kinda like being in someone’s living room versus in a slick store selling merchandise. So we were thankful to start out with that legacy and that vibe which we sometimes refer to as the “hallowed bookstore space.” 

The space has such a historic feel to it. 

We’ve heard that it’s actually a former garage. And before it was a garage, it may have even been a stable. So it goes back quite a ways. 

I bet you get quite a few comments about it. 

We do. One of the very first people to do a Yelp review on us referred to our space as a “speakeasy for books” because you first had to know the secret location of the store before coming in and getting drunk on the books. Because we loved that description so much, we have tee-shirts that say “Evanston Speakeasy for Books” for sale in our store. 

This year (2020) has I’m sure presented a unique set of challenges with the pandemic. Can you share a little about how you’ve been able to fare through all of this? 

At the very beginning of the pandemic when we were forced to close very suddenly like everyone else, we had no idea what was going to happen and how long we were going to be closed for. We were quite lucky compared to lots of other small retail businesses and bookstores because we had a very robust website that we could leverage to provide our customers with access to the warehouse for special order books, including thousands of titles that we don’t have in the store. So it was not that hard for us to suddenly pivot to becoming an online bookstore. 

What are your thoughts on the online bookstore model? 

While it worked well during the full shutdown, we don’t have a long-term interest in being an online bookstore.

It seems like you were able to do well though during the shutdown. What do you attribute to that? 

One sort of unexpected consequence of the pandemic was that the 800-pound gorilla whose name begins with an “A” that I don’t like to say decided that they were going to deprioritize things like book deliveries because they were so busy shipping out toilet paper. So all of a sudden people who were going to order books from them found that it was going to be a month to six-week wait. The good news for us is that we could get stuff to them pretty quickly. So that was a great boost to our business. 

Sounds like you were pretty prepared? 

Yes, to the extent that we could be. Our website was ready and waiting to go and of course, the public libraries all shut down. 

So there wasn’t really anyplace else to get books except for from your local independent bookstore, just like in days past when chains like Amazon and Barnes and Noble didn’t exist.  

All this being said, online is definitely a different sort of business model from how we typically operate. For one thing, because the profit margin isn’t as big. Honestly, we would not have been able to survive for long solely based on those sales. 

What about federal, state, and local pandemic relief funding for your business? 

I applied for every kind of aid in existence but had no idea whether we were going to receive it. The wait times were so long and the processes were confusing. 

So what did you do in the meantime to fill in the gaps? 

To ensure that we were going to be able to survive, I launched a GoFundMe campaign very early on. This was largely a result of my strong belief in not wanting to have to let go of any of my staff during the pandemic. Because in the end, the emergence of the pandemic wasn’t their fault. I think that having people who depend on a weekly check from us spurred me to do anything I had to do to support them. I mean, if we have to close the store, we have to close the store. But short of that I was going to find a way to make sure that they still get paid.

How did your GoFundMe campaign go? 

It was very successful. Our customers were very encouraging. In addition to donating money which was a shock at the beginning, many of them also took the time to express on the GoFundMe page why they were giving us money, how important the store was to them and how important they thought it was to the community. Witnessing that during one of the darkest most disparaging days of the lockdown was uplifting. More than anything, it got us through emotionally. 

So take us back to the early days of the pandemic. What was that like? 

At the very beginning it was a very mixed bag. One thing to add to all of this is the fact that the Barnes and Noble a half-a-block away from us which had been in Evanston for over 25 years closed. Yep, just up and disappeared. So I believe we started to get a flow of customers who used to shop there. 

What sort of books were customers seeking out?  

We were selling a lot of what I would call “comfort books” like mysteries and cozy reads and bestsellers. It seemed like people really didn’t want to really dig deep into all of the dysfunction and dystopia occurring around them. Rather they wanted to escape and be comforted. Then, of course, George Floyd was murdered, and that just galvanized everybody. 

Can you share more about the impact of this tragic event and ensuing racial justice protests on your store sales?  

In particular, I think white readers suddenly began feeling that while they thought they were woke, in reality, they were insufficiently prepared for this and needed to self-educate a bit more. So we had a major rush for all sorts of titles about race and racism and anti-racism which was an astonishing thing for everyone I think. We were ordering these books by the carton and even so, we had people waiting for weeks to get them.

As a bookstore owner, that must have been very interesting to observe. Are things continuing along that same trajectory at present? 

What’s really interesting to me is that it's not just the same five books that everybody was ordering at the beginning. I’m seeing people go really deep now. Older books and more academic titles on the history of racism or the history of Blacks in America are what is selling now. 

Looking forward, where do you think the independent bookstore movement is headed over the next 6-12 months?

Well, I’ve been in this business a very long time in all different aspects of it. I’ve worked in book publishing in addition to being an author myself. I first started moonlighting while I was writing books and began working a day or two a week in an independent bookstore. That was in the ’90s. So I’ve seen this industry go through a lot. 

Can you talk about the big box stores that appeared during that time? 

Yes, there was the rise of the chain stores, where Barnes and Noble and Borders were literally setting up across the street from each other everywhere. This drove vast numbers of independent bookstores out of business. I think that over the course of the nineties into the early 2000’s we went from having something like 5,000 independent bookstores in the country to having something like 1,200. It was really, really bad. 

So when did things begin to recover for independent bookstores? 

I would say around 2008-2009. And I don’t remember offhand when Borders went out of business but that was a big opportunity for independent stores along with the fact that Barnes and Noble just started disinvesting in the whole idea of the print book. They decided that in order to compete with Amazon they had to focus on their Nook reader along with a lot of non-book merchandise, discount books, and their cafes. 

And then came Amazon

Yes. So to answer your question, we are facing these incredible challenges where people are only now starting to realize the impact that Amazon’s strip mining is having on the book industry. And by the way, not just bookstores but all sorts of retail establishments in downtowns and local neighborhoods that the big box movement has led to. 

You seem to have some harsh feelings about Amazon.

I do. Because if you were to go and look around at all the brown paper in all the windows where places have been boarded up you begin to realize that this didn’t start with Covid. It was the result of things getting harder and harder for retail shopkeepers of all stripes to sell enough of anything to pay rent in the age of Amazon. 

Amazon Lawsuit UPDATE

And you are so open to sharing about this. 

I know a lot of booksellers who are very reluctant to talk about Amazon because they think it sounds whiny and like it’s complaining and bla, bla, bla. But I don’t agree with that. I am happy to talk about it because I think that if people really understood the broader implications of Amazon, they wouldn’t support them. 

Are you saying that Amazon has a predatory approach to its practices? 

Yes. For example, it is clear that they use books as a loss leader to get people to sign up for their various services only to use their data to sell them other stuff.  They’ve figured out how to mass publish many of these books. Moreover, they often bully independent publishers into giving them a much better deal on books than we as a bookstore get. And then if they sell the books at a loss it doesn’t even matter because they are getting all of this investor funding. Meanwhile, they have created this horrible, very unlevel playing field for every independent bookstore that actually has to earn its rent and money to pay employees by selling books for full price. 

Sounds like this would make it challenging for any small, independent bookstore to compete. 

It does,  particularly when a customer just picks up a book in our store and says, “Oh, I can get the same book from Amazon at 60% off.” Fortunately, what independent bookstores have learned to do really well during the years I have been in the business is to make a case to their customers and their neighborhoods and communities about why the extra money they have to spend on purchasing that book in a bookstore is worth it. What they are beginning to realize is that those extra dollars are actually paying for the convenience of having a store in their community where they can walk in, browse and discover books that they didn’t even know about. 

Can you talk about the community and civic aspects of independent bookstores? That certainly would seem to be an advantage that independent bookstores have over Amazon. 

For sure. Prior to the pandemic, many stores had a very active schedule of in-person events where you could bring your kids to storytime and sit on the floor of the store looking at books and embracing one’s love of reading. And then there are the local authors who get to launch their newest book. Of course, all of this will continue to be virtual for a while but there is still real value here in terms of community. 

Any future plans for Bookends and Beginnings as we make our way through this pandemic? 

We are expanding. We not only made it through the shutdown but we are now growing. So there is a storefront on Sherman Avenue, the major thoroughfare right around the corner that we are taking over.  We’re getting it ready to open in late October (2020). We’ve been a well-kept secret in the alley for long enough. So it’s going to be exciting to actually have this well-trafficked storefront knowing that it’s hard to run a business with no street visibility. 

Your final thoughts as we close our conversation? 

I think that as downtowns and local areas have fewer and fewer places to go, the value of places like bookstores becomes clearer and clearer. Yes, a lot of people have elected to only read on their devices. And that’s fine. But there are still a lot of people who still really find value in picking up and reading a physical book. And we want them to know that we’re still here for them.