Bookends & Beginnings Creates a Community Gathering Place

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Husband-and-wife team Jeff Garrett and Nina Barrett welcomed their first customers through the doors of Bookends & Beginnings on June 14, 2014, and the Evanston, Illinois, store is now well on its way to becoming a welcoming “third place” for the surrounding community.

“We were inspired by Ray Oldenburg’s book, The Great Good Place, and the notion that bookstores, just like taverns or churches, are third places. They’re not home, they’re not places of work, but they’re places of gathering and community,” said Garrett.

Already, customers “recognize that this is a place that creates community,” he added. “We have plenty of open space here where people can assemble and gather, and we have these great conversations at the cash register about books.”

In the location of the former Bookman’s Alley (a store made famous not only for its mystery and charm but also by its appearance in Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife), Bookends & Beginnings offers a homey setting. “We wanted to preserve that magical, you’re-in-somebody’s-living-room vibe,” Barrett said. With shelving nabbed from a used bookstore in the suburbs, twice-reclaimed wood from a boutique for the old, barn-like ceiling, and antique furniture and oriental rugs from an auction house, the inside of the store “is very rustic.”

“I had always wanted to open an independent bookstore, from the first time I stepped into Evanston,” said Barrett, whose interest in literature is shared by her husband. Barrett’s former careers took her into the world of book publishing, to the Literary Guild Book Club, to authoring three books, and to moonlighting as a bookseller at Chicago’s Women & Children First. Barrett also holds a degree in culinary arts and is the winner of two James Beard awards for her food reporting.

Garrett spent his career as an academic research librarian at Northwestern University, with an expertise in special collections as well as antique books and international children’s books.

“We wanted to do something together and it was either that or a restaurant, where she told me I could be the sommelier — I thought that would be the end of me,” Garrett joked. Considering the literary experience between the two of them, “It seemed like a good idea at the time. We went into this with a 25-page business plan, we analyzed the market, the demographics, the competition — we did not go into this as starry-eyed youngsters.”

Barrett credits the initial success of the bookstore to the incredible media coverage they received prior to opening, which she said was due to the careful planning and well-thought-out business plan they drafted, though they did receive pushback in the beginning about their plan to not offer Wi-Fi access at the store. “I don’t know when it became normal to walk into a bookstore and see everyone in the store on a laptop or their iPhones. I grew up in a world where people walked into a bookstore and people were looking at the books,” said Barrett.

“We are crafting an environment suitable for reading. If you go to a gym, there’s not usually a bar there,” Garrett agreed. “We can craft the environment that we think stimulates people to do what people come into bookstores to do.”

Readers venturing into Bookends & Beginnings will find it stocked with plenty of new and used books, shelved alongside one another, with brand-new hardcovers and paperbacks on display up front.  

The store’s children’s section, currently small and cozy and home to a very classic selection, will grow over time. “The distinctive things are the international children’s books,” which are stocked in 26 languages at the moment, Barrett said. “Evanston has a very international population. We have those families coming in here and being really excited because they don’t see these books anywhere.” The store also has a selection of used young adult and middle grade books to allow children to buy an armful of titles with just their allowances.

But Barrett’s pride and joy is the cookbook section. After a story about the bookstore ran in the Chicago Sun Times, Barrett received a call from a widower who wanted to donate his wife’s cookbook collection, a trove of nearly 600 books in pristine condition that she had amassed over her years as a professional chef and caterer. “He had read my background and that I wanted my cookbook section to be a destination for foodies. He wanted something good to come out of her death, and he felt like she really would have wanted to help an independent bookstore get off the ground,” said Barrett.

Bookends & Beginnings welcomed in the Ida Mollenhauer Cookbook Collection, which features titles on everything from restaurants elBulli and Eleven Madison Park to chefs Mario Batali and Thomas Keller, plus professional training and rare and signed cookbooks. The bookstore will be donating 10 percent of profits from sales of the books to the NorthShore University HealthSystem’s music therapy program. “People have really responded to the story,” said Barrett. “They’ve been coming and looking at these cookbooks — it’s just a priceless gift.”

A gallery of non-book items is also on display for customers, with one of Barrett’s favorite picks being a line of colorful resin jewelry from a designer in Germany, Die Kunstwerkstatt Berlin. Looking to also feature the work of local artists, the store will display pen-and-watercolor sketches of the store and handmade quilts, with the images from both to be translated onto notecards. “I just want to have really beautiful, unique stuff that you can’t find in chain stores,” Barrett said.

While redesigning the bookstore, Barrett and Garrett discovered a back room that had been shuttered during Bookman’s Alley’s reign. “It’s like the secret annex,” said Barrett, a brick room that will serve as an office and a classroom for writing workshops. Between the room and the retail space is a window that will make the perfect puppet theater in the future.

As the bookstore continues to develop its inventory and offerings, customers will be treated to an ever-growing community spirit, and they are already responding to the store’s charm, said Barrett. “The joy on their faces when they walk in — they say, ‘Wow! This is how I remember bookstores being.’”