By Hugh Iglarsh

To enter Bob Katzman’s Magazine Museum (“Where Print Still Lives”) is to leave the aggressively ordinary surroundings of downtown Skokie and find oneself in the weird and disorienting universe of Jorge Luis Borges, the blind Argentinian librarian whose fantastical tales and essays wrestle with the concepts of chaos and order within a print-defined world.

Katzman’s collection of 140,000 vintage magazines (as well as mounds of posters and flags and banners of every nation) is an overwhelming textual, cultural and historical sprawl, stacked in loose groupings and postings from toe level to ceiling tile. At first glance, it looks like a miniature version of Borges’ infinite Library of Babel, which contains all possible books, including one written in a “Samoyed-Lithuanian dialect of Guaraní, with inflections from classical Arabic”—but alas, no discoverable card catalog. Read the rest of this entry »

Nicholas Idell, right

By Alex Baumgardner

Nicholas Idell had been working at comic book shops in Chicago for a few years when he finally decided to strike out on his own. The 29-year-old Rockford native didn’t want to limit himself. He considered moving back home from Andersonville, knowing there was an open market in Rockford. At the behest of friends, he scouted areas in Washington D.C. and California. Ultimately, he settled, quite literally, in a back alley.

Opened just last month, AlleyCat Comics is squeezed in the courtyard behind a Potbelly and Starbucks, and accessible only through a gated alley no wider than a yard or two on North Clark. A handmade metal sign forged by Idell’s dad is the only signal to sidewalk traffic that it’s there. Idell admits he wasn’t floored by the location when it was first presented to him, but fellow owners David Ballard and Tim Harris both had a feeling the secluded spot could be a special one, so Andersonville’s first back-alley comic shop was born.

“We knew that this neighborhood could really use a store,” Idell says. “Everyone loved that space. And I thought, ‘Well, if everyone loves it so much, how much is not having a storefront really going to hinder this business? Or could it help?’” Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Linda Bubon

By Alex Baumgardner

Amazon has become a four-letter word in independent bookstores around Chicago. Linda Bubon, co-owner of Women & Children First in Andersonville, can barely bring herself to speak the name of the e-commerce company aloud in her store. She only mouths it when talking about lost sales to the online giant.

This is the perceived relationship between local bookstores and big business and modern technology: resilient holdovers from an era long past, community nooks that serve only a niche market of collectors and literary snobs, fighting to even tread water as corporate stores flood the market around them. “We’ve never been like that,” says Bubon, whose store was one of the first in Chicago to go online over twenty years ago. “We’ve always tried to be very relevant. But God forbid we don’t sell eBooks. That would just reinforce that stereotype.” Those like Bubon readily admit Amazon has taken a good chunk of their business. And its proprietary device, the Kindle, threatened to slice even deeper into profits and essentially cut them off from the eBook market. So it would make sense for independents to be a bit wary of the eBook trend. But since Google settled a class-action lawsuit filed against Google Books, which paved the way for it to enter the online distribution scene in December of 2010, more than 250 independent stores across the country, including ten in and around Chicago, have begun selling eBooks. Many, like Women & Children First, have made them available directly from their websites, offering them the ability to sell them competitively across platforms.

Unlike the Kindle, which only supports Amazon’s extensive library, Google eBooks allow independent stores to make their curated selections available on numerous devices, like the iPad, Barnes and Noble’s Nook and the Sony Reader. Still, independent bookstores thrive on their community of customers and theoretically would be hurt by the disintegration of that culture. Read the rest of this entry »

Susan Frischer’s husband knew they would need to think of something that would stick in people’s minds. Independent bookstores are typically the place to find rarities, relics and expensive antique bindings. But Market Fresh Books in Evanston has a different idea of what an independent bookstore should be.

“We joked it was how you would buy salami,” Frischer says. Market Fresh sells books by the pound, rather than pricing them separately. The store began online, through outlets like Amazon.com, but decided to open a brick-and-mortar outpost last Halloween. The idea has apparently caught on, because a second location has popped up, just a few blocks away.

While their main focus is books, you can also find DVDs, CDs and records, also sold by the pound. The store focuses on books that people could find in Barnes and Noble, more recent titles. But they do occasionally get more unique finds. Read the rest of this entry »

Open Books saw one of its goals met this past November with the opening of their bookstore in Chicago’s Near North Side. “The reception to the store has been tremendous, and shows the store is filling a need in the Chicago literary scene,” says Becca Keaty of Open Books. “We survived the winter season and we’re really excited for the weather to be nicer.” To kick off the (hopefully) approaching warm weather, Open Books is celebrating its fourth year as a nonprofit. On May 1, Open Books invites families to come and enjoy tours of the literacy center, contests, a birthday-party-themed “Storytime” and, of course, cake. Read the rest of this entry »

Zines, often relegated to a tiny shelf in most bookstores like a footnote or a last-second addendum, are taking center stage this weekend as four Chicagoans put on the first ever Chicago Zine Fest. “We went to the Milwaukee Zine Fest and were surprised by how many Chicago people went up for that,” says co-organizer Matt Czerwinski. “It planted the idea to have one in Chicago.” The fest will kick off this Friday with a reading at Quimby’s which features “King Cat” author John Porcellino along with Anne Elizabeth Moore, Jeffery Brown and five zinesters who were selected by random lottery. There will also be a zine-related art opening at Johalla Projects Friday night, which will conclude with a screening of the Gadabout Traveling Film Festival. Friday’s events, aside from entertaining, attempt to start a dialogue between zinesters and the public. “We tried to figure out a way to get people talking to each other and get zinesters meeting each other. That’s a drawback of zine fests that we saw,” says Czerwinksi. “A lot of times you don’t meet anyone, but that’s why these events exist.” More info can be found at chicagozinefest.org. (Peter Cavanaugh)

By Micah McCrary

“More than fifty percent of the people in our city have low or limited literacy skills,” says Erin Walter, Literacy Director of Open Books in Chicago. “And sixty-one percent of low-income families nationwide have no children’s books at home.” Walter sits alongside Becca Keaty, Director of Marketing and Public Relations, and Stacy Ratner, Executive Director, in the soon-to-be-opened bookstore, which will house between 40,000 and 50,000 books by its grand opening November 21-22.

The store’s multicolored walls with inspirational and clever quotes like “He that loves reading has everything within his reach” resemble a painting of easter eggs, and ubiquitous shelves of purple, orange, green, pink and blue stand in ordered chaos, all of which can hold up to 60,000 books in total. In the children’s section, which is divided off by a standalone wall built to look like the front of a house, book clouds—donated books that have been painted to look like clouds in the sky—hang from a cerulean ceiling. A faux fireplace lounge hosts a wall covered by tiles purchased, customized and donated by both volunteers and by others who support the literary venture of Open Books. Read the rest of this entry »

A crisp, lively fall afternoon with a brilliant blue sky, and comics artist Ivan Brunetti’s book signing has been going surprisingly—given his cult status among comic lovers—slowly. “A Columbia College student was here earlier filming [for her documentary] and she was like, ‘This was a bad idea,’” he says.

“No, actually I said that,” he adds, the comic equivalent of burnt toast.

A short stack of unsigned books rest on the table, while behind it, there is no line to speak of. Over the next hour a handful of fans, all of who seem to know Brunetti personally, trickle in at widely spaced intervals.

The comic scene at the venue contains barely enough energy to turn on a Christmas light, let alone constitute enough intrigue for a junior filmmaker’s voracious enthusiasm.

But cozy looking and brightly lit, Third Coast Comics is inviting to the passerby; though this isn’t typical with most comic shops, owner Terry Gant points out. Most comic stores are “not inviting to normal people, “ he says, but entering Third Coast “feels like your stepping into a book store, not an opium den.” Read the rest of this entry »

By Katie Fanuko

Photo: Kat Fitzgerald

The third floor of The Breakers at Edgewater Beach is bustling with energy during Women and Children First’s 30th Anniversary Celebration & Benefit. Store owners Linda Bubon and Ann Christophersen chat with the many women (and men) who have supported the bookstore over the past three decades as they dine and await speeches from keynote speakers Alison Bechdel and Dorothy Allison. Yet even though the party goes off without a hitch, their work isn’t even close to being finished. “I’m more sure than ever that we are in the middle of things, thirty years is nothing. It’s just a start on all of the work that needs to be done… there are a lot of the same issues that we’ve been working on for thirty, forty, fifty years and they are still with us,” says Bubon.

When walking into the feminist bookstore located in Andersonville, it’s understandable how a place like this could last thirty years, because there isn’t anything else quite like it in Chicago, with an inviting atmosphere that’s both welcoming to first-timers and keeps regulars coming back. This is exactly the kind of place that Bubon and Christophersen were hoping to create back in November 1979. Read the rest of this entry »

The flier offers readings, sellings and most promising of all, human interaction for fine comic book readers—a novel concept in the age of texting and tweeting. Technology aims to bring us together, and yet it works to isolate us. The 2009 Punchbuggy Tour has hit its Chicago leg. Featuring Liz Baillie (“My Brain Hurts,” “Freewheel”), Ken Dahl (“Welcome To The Dahl House,” “Monster”) and MK Reed (“Cross Country,” Americus”), the tour features original readings and book signings.

Chicago is the ninth stop for the irreverent trio. A modest thirty minutes late, Dahl arms himself with a banjo. Baillie has a ukulele. Something’s not right here. Is this a show? “Somewhere along the way we developed a bit of apathy,” says Dahl. “So we added a soundtrack to the readings.” Indeed, the stringed authors provide a folksy twang to the readings. The music adds an exclamation point to the stories. Taking frequent beer breaks, the speakers seem to have a knack for creating an intimate reading space.

Reed fiddles with the computer, and presents a selection from her graphic novel “Cross Country.” Baillie begins her readings, humbly warning, “Mine’s not as funny as theirs,” though it proves entertaining enough. Dahl reads an excerpt from his latest work, “Monster,” a graphic novel about a man humorously stricken with herpes. At Dahl’s cue, Baillie lets out a monstrous burp. This reading has surround sound. (David Stockdale)