How a collegiate bookstore and its community invested in each other
Nina Barrett wasn’t always so sure what was in store for her professionally. She had an array of passions and established skill sets, but she simultaneously yearned for something completely different.
From a spin through culinary school to finding her niche by way of a hidden alleyway entrance, Nina’s path wasn’t conventional, but it did land her exactly where she was supposed to be—not to mention the dozens of lessons she learned along the way.
Follow along on Nina’s journey to becoming the owner of Bookends & Beginnings, an independent bookstore in Evanston, Illinois, and see how she achieved her dreams with a “shoestring budget” and a little serendipity.
Finding the industry you belong in and navigating the route to entrepreneurship
Like many business owners, Nina didn’t start off on the path her life ultimately led her to. After graduating from Northwestern University with a masters in journalism, she signed a book contract and was writing and reporting while raising her two children. She also spent 15 years working at a bookstore called Women & Children First in Chicago, where she became somewhat of an “apprentice,” learning about the ins and outs of managing a bookstore.
Though Nina had spent much of her life in the literary world, there was a significant period of time where she desired change. With a passion for cooking and a goal of opening a restaurant, Nina pivoted to culinary school in 2006 with the dream of introducing a new restaurant concept into Chicago’s culinary scene.
“I wanted to be in a collaborative kind of business… but the economics of that business are very tough. I had several ideas for business plans [to open a restaurant], but every time I would sit down and try to think it through, it just seemed like the business model was so punishing.”
Having intimate knowledge of an industry isn’t mandatory when you start out, but for Nina, jumping head-first into an industry she was passionate about but didn’t know inside and out was a huge risk in the difficult economic market of 2007-2008. Still, she felt the need to create something from the ground up.
Creating the dream with a few ingredients: a shoestring budget and a little serendipity
In 2013, Nina learned a retail space was available in Evanston, one with which she was quite familiar, having reported on its previous incarnation, Bookman’s Alley. With this news, the idea of starting her own bookstore—which had always been in the back of her mind—could actually become a reality.
“It was really an iconic place,” Nina said. “I have always thought Evanston doesn’t have a kind of quirky, independent, collegiate kind of bookstore that you would expect to find in a college town. But if Bookman’s Alley is going out of business, and that space is going to become available, that is exactly the sort of place where you could have a store like this.
“Since I had inadvertently done a 15-year apprenticeship, I knew a lot about running a bookstore. I thought, now’s the time, and Evanston is the place. Here is this magical space that’s becoming available. And I just decided to take the plunge.”
However, diving into the bookstore industry isn’t easy in the modern age—the reality of owning an independent bookstore isn’t as romantic as it might appear. According to the 2020 U.S. Census, there’s been a 44% drop in the amount of bookstores between 2019-2021 within the United States. Additionally, the emergence of large chain bookstores across the country and digital bookstores like Amazon have entirely changed the landscape.
“I wasn’t really planning to open a bookstore because especially [around] 2006, it looked like the big chain bookstores were driving all of the independent [stores] out of business. A Barnes & Noble or Borders had opened up everywhere. They had driven [what is] sometimes referred to as the slaughter of the independent bookstores because thousands of stores went out of business, and it looked like the one I was working at was also not going to survive.”
Yet Nina’s knowledge of running a bookstore and drive to create a business for the community catalyzed her plan.
“It was not a fantasy. I really understood, this is how you have to approach it as a business… it has to pay for itself,” Nina said. “Even though I did make a business plan, and I did sit down for three days with a friend of mine, and we made Excel spreadsheets and filled in all the numbers, an awful lot of it actually came down to serendipity.”
After all her planning, Nina found herself working on a “shoestring budget.” She began to think of new ways to finance her plan and looked for any resources that would help her save on the opening. Between sourcing furniture and accumulating stock from closing bookstores in surrounding suburbs near Evanston, as well as cutting expenses on plumbing and heating, Nina was able to open Bookends & Beginnings.
While she had to compete with larger bookstore chains and online services, Nina relied on her brand’s core products: books from university presses and literary classics that speak to the aesthetic of the collegiate bookstore she hoped to create. Nina maintains that the heart of Bookends & Beginnings really is the community.
An Evanston institution: becoming a community investment and trusting customers to propel success
During the COVID-19 lockdown, Bookends & Beginnings maintained its direct shipping services, allowing the team to maintain a slow but steady stream of revenue during the pandemic; yet, they were still confronted with the risk of closing due to higher rent prices.
In response, Nina and the team created a GoFundMe campaign to help finance their team and operations. While at first hesitant to launch the fund, Nina found that relying on community investments was the only way to keep her business afloat.
“The people who gave money made all of these incredible comments about how important the store was to them, which was unbelievably gratifying to hear people express that. But afterwards, I [realized] that people in the community were literally investing in keeping the store going, and I [reflect now that] people were even more attached to the store because they bought into it. People were calling it an ‘Evanston institution.’”
Soon after businesses were allowed to reopen, another roadblock emerged: a 125% surge in their rental price for the storefront. This forced Nina and her team to find a new location that could also better accommodate their needs. They had outgrown their original location, not to mention the front door opened out into an alley, so they yearned for a place where they could be more visible and accessible—and that’s exactly what they found.
Their new, larger storefront—just a block away from the original location—opens up to a busier street, making them more prone to foot traffic, and its colorful, bright, spacious, and cozy interior is ultimately a tribute to their community in Evanston.
“I think it’s a much better space for us, and I love the store that we built. I was able to use everything in that old store that had been secondhand. Upstairs, I was able to build all custom shelving. The mural, which was painted by my two adult sons, who are both professional artists, gives so much energy to the whole concept of the bookstore. It’s just a very bright, well lit, energetic space, and it makes the books pop,” Nina said.
Into the future: a focus on bringing reading back into the community’s day-to-day
Bookends & Beginnings’ new storefront has transformed the space to accommodate the community in a way it never had the ability to in its prior location. Their newest addition, a sparkling bar with full beverage service, allows customers to enjoy the space in more ways than one, encouraging customers to think of the shop as a true community space.
They’ve also added new merchandising, including coasters, tote bags, bookmarks, puzzles, and more—and because the space boasts enough standing room for close to 200 people, Bookends & Beginnings has hosted a series of events since reopening in February 2023 and is truly an embodiment of the community in Evanston.
The popularity of the events and the integration of new programming within the store has allowed them to expand their team as well, with the most recent addition of Event Manager Kate Harding. Kate’s mission is to create new events programming for the local community to show that their investment into the store is core to Bookends & Beginnings’ commitment to embracing its role as an Evanston institution.
Outside of continuing to expand their reach within the community, Nina has one real hope: that people continue to read.
“I sometimes worry that the actual biggest competitor that we have now is just social media,” she said. “I think in a way we’re like the gym or athletic club for people’s minds. When I started the store 10 years ago, the prediction was that in the next four or five years, books were going to basically go away, and that 80% of reading would be done on ebooks and only 20% of reading would be print books. I think that’s why it’s even more important that we stay here. I think that bookstores aren’t going to be the shining beacon of keeping your brain alive, [but] that’s what I hope we’re gonna stand for in the future.”