1/28/2024 0 Comments Bookends and beginnings![]() The crippling effects of the pandemic brought many businesses to a standstill, and Bookends wasn’t unscathed. Credit: Bookends & Beginningsīut all those years in the bookstore trenches couldn’t prepare her for what came next. The interior of Bookends & Beginnings is lined with books of all kinds. She went to culinary school, got a chef’s degree, and eventually did freelance food coverage for WBEZ, the NPR affiliate in Chicago.īut Barrett made her way back to books: She came across a collection of archives while working a public relations job at Northwestern’s main library that eventually turned into her fourth, and latest, book: The Leopold and Loeb Files: An Intimate Look at One of America’s Most Infamous Crimes.Īnd in 2013, when she heard Bookman’s Alley was closing, she stepped in to take over the space. “I sometimes call it the massacre of the independent bookstores,” Barrett said. Giant chains like Barnes & Nobles, bolstered by the e-books boom, were driving smaller stores out of business. The 15 years she spent at the well-known feminist bookstore in Chicago’s Andersonville neighborhood taught her quite a bit about how to run a bookstore.īy the time she left in 2005, the future of local independent bookstores was grim. ![]() After getting her master’s degree and becoming a mother, Barrett worked part-time at Women and Children First while writing books on the side. “Every day, people come in and they’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, I didn’t know you were here!’ And now that we have that storefront on the main Sherman strip, we’re getting that more and more,” said Dunnell, who lives in Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood.īarrett’s decision to enter the bookstore business wasn’t just born of nostalgia for her days at Northwestern, but years of experience in the business as both an author and a bookseller. Lotte Dunnell, 26, who has been working at Bookends for 2½ years, said she loves when passersby discover the store. “We absolutely are attracting a kind of walk-in customer that we wouldn’t really get here.” “We are actually growing, and we need more space, but a lot of the motivation was just to have a foothold out on the main street where we’re visible,” Barrett said. Bookends & Beginnings, long hidden down an alley, has opened a storefront on Sherman Avenue. So in January 2021, Barrett made her biggest change as Bookends expanded to a storefront location next to Saville Flowers at 1716 Sherman Ave., which now serves as a site for bestselling books, gifts and stationery. earned it the nickname of a “speakeasy” for books, as one Yelp review called it.īut with growing inventory, pandemic capacity restrictions and declining foot traffic, the bookstore could no longer afford having a concealed location. ![]() Marked by a plaque hammered into the side of a brick-walled building and a street sign pointing toward the almost-hidden-away alley entrance, Bookends’ secretive location at 1712 Sherman Ave. Her husband, Jeff Garrett, an expert in children’s books and special collections, helped out at her store for a few years but has returned to librarianship. She has been constantly evolving her woman-owned business to keep it alive and thriving. When Carlson retired in 2013 and the opportunity presented itself to take over the bookstore’s old space, she jumped at the chance to honor his store’s legacy while putting her own stamp on it. Years later, the same store would be enshrined in pop culture as a key setting in Audrey Niffenegger’s 2003 bestselling novel The Time Traveler’s Wife, later made into a film of the same name.Īnd even as Barrett’s career would take her first from journalist to published author and then to culinary school, she never forgot Bookman’s. So, of course, I wrote the story,” she said. “It had this ‘you’ve gone back in time, Harry Potter kind of feeling,’ and it was so atmospheric. A labor of love for longtime owner Roger Carlson, Bookman’s Alley possessed a unique aura that inspired her. In fall 1985, Barrett, then a grad student at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, saw the antique used bookstore as an ideal topic for a profile story to write for class. When Nina Barrett first visited Bookman’s Alley, the quaint downtown Evanston bookstore tucked away in an alley off Sherman Avenue, she never imagined she’d be writing the store’s next chapter some 30 years later. Credit: Bookends & Beginnings Credit: Submitted Bookends & Beginnings is tucked away in an alley off Sherman Avenue.
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