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 »

Power in Chicago has been passed on. No, we’re not talking about that little office in City Hall, but that Oprah, she of the book club that long perched her atop this list, has flown the coop. So now it’s official. The City of Big Shoulders is Poetry’s town. It’s unlikely that Carl Sandburg would have ever imagined such an unlikely outcome when he crafted the city’s calling card, in verse, but it’s not even debatable. Not only can we claim Poetry magazine, the premier publication of its kind anywhere, but its wealthy sibling the Poetry Foundation will open a whole building dedicated to the form later this month. Plus, this is the town that created the Poetry Slam as well as Louder Than a Bomb, the largest teen slam anywhere. Talk about poetic justice. 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 »

Is it wrong to feel optimistic? You couldn’t be blamed if you didn’t. Yet while the country’s economy crumbles around us and less and less funds are available for the producers of the printed word, those in the literary world are finding new and inventive ways to stay afloat. We will not go down without a fight, and progress, of course, is key. So is awareness—in order to get the word out more efficiently (and, likely, to untether itself from the uncertain future of the paper form), Printers Row Book Fair changed its name from “Book Fair” to “Lit Fest” to have a title that better fully represents the weekend’s events, in time for its twenty-fifth anniversary edition. As is our custom, we time our annual Lit 50 list to the weekend’s events; this year’s list of local behind-the-scenes literati—no straight-up authors or poets this time—covers a large spectrum of Chicago’s world of words. As with past years we sought out those behind the smaller presses as well as the monumental figures. Some new names have emerged and many staples appear again, but all tirelessly labor to bring this ancient art to the community at large. Read the rest of this entry »

Handwritten recommendations are taped to shelves and stuffed between pages, Dixie Chicks’ newest release plays in the background and neon hot-pink signs hang throughout the store, “lesbian, gay, bi, transgender, queer books this-a-way,” pointing customers to a section that takes up nearly half the space. Opening in 1979, in Lincoln Park on West Armitage Avenue, Women and Children First had maybe a shelf of lesbian literature, says Linda Bubon, co-owner of the store. Business grew every year for the first fourteen years, allowing them to expand and move twice since 1990, until it reached its present location in Andersonville. Read the rest of this entry »