Exile in Bookville
Image courtesy of the store
A couple of blocks from The Art Institute of Chicago on Michigan Avenue lives the historic Fine Arts building, a grand work of architecture dating back to 1898. Head inside and take the last manned elevator in Chicago up to the second floor, where a sandwich board will welcome you to a unique independent bookstore.
Floor to ceiling windows overlook beautiful Grant Park and the city’s skyline. Old concert posters from bands like Wilco and Sleater-Kinney are interspersed with shelves of titles newish and old, many related to the music industry. There is also a display of every title in the 33⅓ book series profiling various music albums, plus vinyl for sale and a turntable where visitors can rummage through the store’s expansive collection to choose the day’s shopping soundtrack.
Image courtesy of the store
“It feels like not quite a bookstore when you walk in,” says co-owner of Exile in Bookville Javier Ramirez, who worked at Tower Records for a decade before joining their book division and becoming a full-time bookseller. “It’s different, a throwback to something that doesn’t really exist anymore. That’s what we wanted to make it feel like, that you were walking into a book store/record store because we care about those two equally.”
Exile in Bookville (which takes its name from Liz Phair’s 1993 debut album Exile in Guyville, recorded in Chicago) comes third in the line of bookstores to have occupied its current location. Select Works—“a legit used bookstore with a cat,” according to Ramirez—operated there for twenty years. The Dial Bookshop, which sold mostly used books with a little new, took up the storefront for three more. Ramirez and his co-owner Kristin Enola Gilbert will celebrate their first year in the space this May.
“When we were first approached to open the store, COVID, as in every city, was still a thing,” says Ramirez. “A lot of businesses had to close in downtown and we had to take that into account, but at the end of the day, we just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to work downtown, to have a bookstore on Michigan Avenue.”
Image courtesy of the store
Ramirez came into the job as no stranger to the challenges that COVID presents to bookselling, having helped build up Madison Street Books in the city’s West Loop for the first few months of the pandemic. Exile in Bookville brought a unique set of obstacles, however. Its small location on the second floor of the Arts building (where often only one elevator shaft operates at a time) makes it difficult for folks to find and challenging to navigate once inside with occupancy restrictions. Having a business model dependent on customers browsing for something unusual rather than popping in for a new release further exacerbates the situation.
“People aren’t coming in looking for something here,” Ramirez says. “They’re coming in blind, and people don’t expect anything when they walk in, so they’re surprised when they see our selection and how invested we are.”
After opening up last May, the first few hand sanitizer-drenched and socially-distanced months found Exile in Bookville making just enough to get by as they worked to flip the store’s stock from 90% used books and 10% new to the complete opposite. Their online sales were also unimpressive. “We actually thought that come early fall we might have to do a GoFundMe,” Ramirez admits.
However, a robust holiday season—where customers made large, individual purchases; often times of independent press titles and booksellers’ recommendations—have swung the shop into a more positive place. The increase in locals slowly making their way back into offices as well as more students and tourists have also helped.
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“It’s really nice to have a broad range of old and young shopping for different things,” says Ramirez. “I think tourists are going to dominate our customer base, which is great. It’s like Groundhog Day. Every day we meet new people from out of town and we give them our bookmark and tell them we ship all over the country, and that’s how we’ve had some of our new customers.”
Everything combined has helped fueled Ramirez’s excitement heading into spring, where in addition to their first-year celebration, the store has a number of other events and ideas planned.
“The difference between this store and others that I’ve worked in is we can play it a little more fast and loose,” explains Ramirez. “When you own something, you can just say I’m going to try this weird thing and if it works, it works, and if it doesn’t, well, we tried.” This philosophy is, in part, inspired by the advice Ramirez received from Midwest bookselling legend and former head of Milkweed Hans Weyandt. “He told me basically to just do whatever weird stuff you thought you could never do when you were an employee. All the ideas you’ve ever cataloged, just do them now.”
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One aspect of this involves implementing ideas Ramirez formed at other stores, such as the On Tap reading and discussion series he started when working at The Book Table, which he is now running both virtually and in person for authors and booksellers alike at Exile in Bookville. Another is the decision to generally curate their events calendar more mindfully.
“I’ve worked for too many bookstores who take everything, who have 12 events a week, and I don’t want to be that bookstore,” Ramirez says, having seen how turnout often dwindles in and frustrates everyone involved. “We want to be able to take the book from the time that we read it to the time of the event and of course to sales beyond that,” he adds, “so we’re very honest with the ones we can’t host, and the ones that we do host, we take care of.”
Despite some anxiety around upcoming in-person events with COVID surges ever possible and present, the team seems generally optimistic going into their second year, whatever the beast may bring. “It’s a weird animal here and we’re just curious to see where it goes,” Ramirez says. “I’ve never felt like the way that I do in this store, with the potential, and unforeseen potential, that might pop up over the next couple of months.”
Recommendations from the Bookseller
“Not enough people have read it,” Ramirez says of his favorite novel, a 1989 National Book Award finalist about a family of purpose-bred circus-geeks touring the backwaters of the United States. “When you’ve met someone who has, it’s like a special club. There were a couple of authors I read back in ’95, ’96 who really shaped me as a reader and as a bookseller, and I’m thankful to Katherine Dunn for doing that.”
This Thing Between Us by Gus Moreno
Ramirez recently recommended this novel—about a man reeling after his wife is killed amidst strange occurrences in their condo just south of Chicago—to the writer Lisa Locascio, whose late mother was a frequent customer of Ramirez’s at Madison Street Books. He is now planning a memorial plaque in Exile in Bookville’s fiction section in her honor. “It’s a ghost story, but the first third of the book is about how people sort of collapse to grief when you lose someone close,” Ramirez explains. “It takes grief and it tips it into this thing that is horrible and sad, but there were also some parts where I laughed out loud, and I was meant to. It’s one of the books that we can’t keep in stock. It’s pretty incredible.”
The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X by Les Payne
This thirty-year-researched, 640-page historic biography of Malcolm X approaches the figure like no one else has before, interviewing people who knew him and correcting historical record to astonishing revelations that won it both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award last year. “It’s one of my favorite nonfiction titles I’ve ever read,” says Ramirez. “It’s pretty brilliant. You learn a lot more about Malcolm X than you thought you ever could.”
Image courtesy of the store
