Guest essay: Bookends & Beginnings needs fresh beginning

Visitors to Bookends & Beginnings’ flagship store at 1620 Orrington Ave. frequently look around at our cozy packed bookshelves, our eclectic chandeliers, our colorful signature mural and all the magical little nooks and crannies upstairs and downstairs, and say, “What a beautiful bookstore.” I’ve also heard it called “the bookstore of my dreams” and “just like that cute little bookstore in You’ve Got Mail .”

You’ve Got Mail , you might remember, is a rom-com from the late 1990s starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, in which he’s opening a big-box bookstore that threatens to put her woman-owned, second-generation indie bookstore out of business. But unbeknownst to both of them, they’re conducting a secret-admirer correspondence with one another, anonymously, using that new-fangled technology called “e-mail.”

Ryan fights mightily to save her store, but the film presents it as virtually inevitable that the chain store will mow her down, because, you know, little businesses can’t offer all the bells and whistles of chain stores. (Let alone Amazon, which hadn’t yet seized the book business by the throat at the time the film was made.)

Panelist Meleika Gardner speaks at “Black Voices: Who Gets to Tell the Story?” at Bookends & Beginnings in late September. Credit: Miah Logan A few weeks ago, Evanston City Councilmember Clare Kelly wrote a piece for the Evanston RoundTable about how fragile things are for many of Evanston’s small businesses right now. She called the closing of the city’s 47-year-old independent shop Guitar Works “a wake-up call” about the situation of many businesses that Evanstonians have treasured for years, though perhaps not shopped at or dined in recently.

Catastrophic weather, politics and sky-rocketing gas and grocery prices have dampened many people’s enthusiasm for in-person shopping, and downtown Evanston seems to be struggling more with its post-pandemic recovery than other nearby neighborhoods like downtown Wilmette and Andersonville.

I am here to confess that while Bookends & Beginnings has held our own downtown for 12 years, this year we’ve seen a marked downturn in foot traffic and sales, and we are one of those fragile businesses. Month after month in 2026, we have taken in less in revenue than we’ve needed to pay rent, salaries, and other expenses — almost all of which are fixed.

As we learned to do in the pandemic, we’re trying to pivot and adjust. We opened Middles Used Books in a second storefront on Orrington, hoping to generate additional foot traffic on our block and offer budget alternatives for book lovers. We opened a MiniBar in our basement to enhance our literary hospitality at events. We’ve established regular Trivia Nights, Zine-Making Workshops and a monthly Bookish Club that invites conversation on book-related topics without requiring any homework.

We think the community wants to keep Bookends downtown. The Daily Northwestern consistently honors us in its annual Best of Evanston issue. Every summer, scores of kids show up for their Where’s Waldo passports, fanning out to explore downtown Evanston businesses in a scavenger hunt for the storybook character Waldo, a program that was started here and is still sponsored every year by Bookends & Beginnings. In August, we hosted the wedding of two customers who love the store so much, they wanted to say their vows surrounded by our bookshelves.

This year we also hosted events with international celebrities Colm Toibin and Carla Hall, as well as local events with Evanston Speaks author Elliott Hurtig, and a panel of Black authors addressing the question of who gets to tell Black stories.

Though in good times, selling books enables us to just about break even, in tougher times, like these, there’s no cushion that allows for us to operate without enough sales.

So I am launching a two-pronged effort to save the store.

First, we’re launching a campaign soliciting one-time contributions to help us dig out of the hole this year has punched in our finances. It’s a big hole, and we know not everyone who loves the store is in a position to give, but we hope crowd-funding will make up the difference. If even a quarter of those who subscribe to our newsletter gave $10 each, we’d be fine.

We’re also establishing a paid membership program modeled on other cultural organizations our customers may support: an opera company, symphony or venue like Ravinia, for example. These organizations all sell tickets, merch and other stuff that brings in revenue for them, but it’s not enough to completely fund their operations. We hope the program helps us create a steady flow of support, to insulate us from future hard times and emergencies.

Book lovers Mairah Goulet and Julian Velasco were married Aug. 29 at Bookends & Beginnings. Credit: Alex Maldonado Photography If this were a Hallmark Holiday movie, right now you’d jump up from your chair, round up your friends, put on your furry coats and mittens and make a day of holiday shopping in downtown Evanston, packing the shops and restaurants while we happy merchants beam and all the cash registers go ka-ching, ka-ching.

But it’s the holiday scenes from You’ve Got Mail that haunt me, especially the one where Meg Ryan decorates her Christmas tree listening to melancholy music and wishing her deceased mother — the founder of her bookstore — was there to tell her that despite the abandonment by her customers, somehow everything was going to be alright.

I’m always confused by the fact that Nora Ephron thought the happy ending was for Hanks to put Ryan out of business, but then to come courting her. That’s not the happy ending I would have chosen for that particular story.

But in our case, it’s up to our customers to choose whether this holiday season is an ending or a new beginning. And I hope you’ll choose to be there for us — and for all the businesses and restaurants downtown that may be hurting right now — so that we can get through this tough spot and can continue to create the unique and independent identity of our special city, Evanston.

Nina Barrett is the author of four books and started Bookends & Beginnings in 2014, in the space once occupied by Bookman’s Alley.

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Guest essay: Bookends & Beginnings needs fresh beginning

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