J.D. Biersdorfer

MINNEAPOLIS — Look up when you enter Birchbark Books &amp; Native Arts and you’ll spot a handcrafted canoe hanging above the table of current and favorite books.

An intricately carved Catholic confessional hugs a wall, although according to the store’s frequently asked questions page, it was renamed a “forgiveness booth” after it was rescued from becoming a bar fixture.

At Birchbark, located at 2115 W. 21st St. in Minneapolis’ Kenwood neighborhood, there is much to see even before you start browsing its stacks and shelves. “It’s one thing to have algorithms keep suggesting the same books to you, but it’s another thing to walk in,” said the store’s owner, Louise Erdrich. “People are looking at you, and you’re looking at actual books, so that you can be inspired and attracted by a physical book.”

Erdrich, 65, has a wide range of experience with physical books. For one, she has written many of them: a memoir, children’s books, poetry collections and 15 novels, including “The Round House,” which won the 2012 National Book Award for fiction. An admirer of bookstores with personalities since her college days, she started Birchbark because she wanted to do something with her daughters.

“It was the year 2000, and they were at these great ages where they were very excited about books,” she said. Though she had no idea how to start a bookstore, she jumped in and opened Birchbark in 2001.

The store sells mainstream fiction, nonfiction and children’s books, but Native American titles, crafts and culture are its specialty. Erdrich is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians (her grandfather was its tribal chairman). She gave a shout-out to Native people in Ojibwe during her National Book Award acceptance speech, and her daughter, Persia, is an immersion teacher in the language.

“A large part of our mission has to do with uplifting and supporting Native communities,” Carolyn Anderson, the store’s operations manager, said. “We purchase contemporary and traditional art prints, cards, jewelry, crafts, skin care and food items directly from Native American artists and artisans usually from this region.”

The shop’s décor also incorporates genuine birch trees. As Erdrich recalls, her contractors found a batch of blown-down birches in Wisconsin and transported them by pickup truck to Minneapolis to be put up in the store — much to the confusion of the local avian population.

“We’ve had birds just fly in,” she said. “We’ve had woodpeckers come in and try to figure out why there are trees in the space.”

Many of those resurrected trees can be seen in the store’s loft area, designed as a toy-filled nook where children can play while their adults browse the shelves. On those shelves, Birchbark dedicates a section to keeping indigenous languages alive through learning guides and dictionaries. It mainly stocks instructional materials for Dakota, Lakota and Ojibwe, three tribes local to the region, Anderson said, but also sells pocket-size dictionaries in Cree, Oji-Cree, Dene and Inuktitut.

Anderson, a Diné/Navajo member whose mother went to an American Indian boarding school, feels that the exposure to indigenous culture and community through stores like Birchbark has helped people become more curious and aware of perspectives outside the mainstream. Those resources also provide comfort for Native Americans, she said. “One of those tools for healing is through research, writing, storytelling, learning our traditions, our history and our languages.”

The Birchbark website is managed by the store’s book buyer, Nathan Pederson, selling mostly Native American-related adult and children’s titles for those who can’t make it to Minneapolis. The store supports Native authors through book events, poetry readings and musical performances, often at the nearby Bockley Gallery.

Just below the gallery, at 2101 Penn Ave. South, lies a new expansion area for Birchbark. Dubbed The Understory, the space sells graphic novels, LGBTQ literature, puzzles and other amusements, all while offering a place to sit and read.

Erdrich, who has a new novel called “The Night Watchman” scheduled for spring, pops into the store occasionally, but she leaves the day-to-day business to Anderson, Pederson and her other colleagues. When she’s not writing her own books, she does take time to contribute to Birchbark’s handwritten recommendations, taped to shelves all over the store.

“That’s the thing about bookstores,” she said. “Bookselling becomes a way of life and something you do as a human being.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/books/birchbark-minneapolis-native-american-books.html" id="1d659597-209a-35cd-afdd-cf27c8f85d46">The New York Times</a>.

Where to Find Native American Culture and a Good Read

(Books Territory)

INDIANAPOLIS — The first thing one notices about Books &amp; Brews is that it is off the beaten path, tucked into an unassuming strip mall in a cluster of industrial-supply stores and a sprawling outpost of the Home Depot near 96th Street on the far north side of Indianapolis. The second thing you may notice upon entering the shop is how inviting it feels, with its bright, bookshelf-lined walls, clusters of sturdy wooden tables and racks of board games — and that is before you get to the back of the store with a craft-beer taproom, small stage and even more packed bookshelves.

“I started off here mainly because as a startup, no one will lease to you,” Jason Wuerfel, 38, founder and president of Books &amp; Brews, said during a recent chat at the company’s “mother ship” location. But the lack of foot traffic has not stopped his establishment from becoming a popular gathering spot.

In addition to its titular fusion of bookshop and brewpub restaurant, Books &amp; Brews is a de facto community center, drawing crowds to trivia contests, fundraisers, tabletop game gatherings and literary events; Charlaine Harris, author of “The Southern Vampire Mysteries” series, dropped by for a book signing in 2017. The stage in the back serves as a performance platform for music jams, open-mic nights and readings.

“Our tagline is ‘a place for people without a place’ and it’s a very personal mission to me,” Wuerfel said. As an English major and member of the University of Michigan’s baseball team during his college years, he said he often felt he was “too jocky” for the nerds and too nerdy for the jocks. “I felt like someone who didn’t have a place.”

His parents owned and operated hotels, as well as an independent minor league baseball team, in Traverse City, Michigan. In working with them, Wuerfel got a close-up look at entrepreneurship, customer service and the nuts and bolts of running a business. A later stint as a stay-at-home dad gave him the bandwidth to tinker with making his own beer, and he began to develop an idea for just the kind of place he wanted to create.

“The fundamental flaw of the bookstore is that it’s designed to be quiet and not let people connect to each other,” Wuerfel said. “When you encourage people to walk around, and you have books and board games and music that breathes life into spaces, you naturally provide the framework for social engagement.”

A Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign that began in 2013 raised about $17,000 from more than 150 backers. To help keep costs down, Wuerfel taught himself carpentry and built most of the store’s wooden furniture himself.

Books &amp; Brews opened in March 2014, and Wuerfel’s vision of a place for people to “read, drink, converse” brought in the customers. He expanded his original footprint before the end of the first year to 4,500 square feet from 2,250 square feet by leasing the empty warehouse next door. “There were nights when I’d just run to Home Depot and buy folding chairs so people would have someplace to sit,” he recalled.

The books for sale all around the store are mostly used, taken by donation and sold for $3 each. A corner nook of children’s books and a retro video-game setup await younger visitors. Ten percent of used-book sales are given to Indy Reads, an area organization that promotes literacy.

The store also offers a rack of new books for sale at the cover price, including titles by Indianapolis native Kurt Vonnegut Jr., whose maternal grandfather was Albert Lieber, a well-known local brewer in his day, and featured in Vonnegut’s autobiographical “Palm Sunday.”

As for the brews, the company has its own line of craft beers, sporting playful names like Shogun Soba Ale and Charlie and the Chocolate Stout. Customers have even dubbed some of the beers — a librarian came up with “Nancy Brew and the Hoppy Boys,” the company’s popular pale ale.

The Books &amp; Brews mother ship is not alone anymore. Wuerfel expanded and franchised the business over the past few years to eight other locations around central Indiana and now partners with Flat12 Bierwerks to produce his beer.

He credits much of his business model’s success to warm customer care and creating situations for guests to feel like they belong. “One hundred percent of the people who are here on any given night are here because they purposefully came for Books &amp; Brews,” he said. “That is true destination appeal and really makes the atmosphere fantastic.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/05/books/books-brews-beer-bookstores-indiana-indianapolis.html" id="9cc0613e-9297-3424-a521-23410079464b">The New York Times</a>.

Where the Thirst for Literature Meets the Thirst for Beer

(Book Territory)

The year 2019 has already been a big one for Carmichael’s Bookstore. The city’s oldest independent bookseller just celebrated its 41st birthday in April. But in January, Carol Besse and Michael Boggs, the couple who founded the store in 1978, officially passed on ownership to the next generation: their daughter, Miranda Blankenship, and niece, Kelly Estep.

Both Blankenship, 37, and Estep, 44, grew up working in the store. Despite having parents as booksellers, Blankenship didn’t jump right into the family business at first, going off to study criminal justice in college. “I honestly kind of rebelled away in the early days,” she said, but eventually rejoined the staff after realizing she enjoyed helping people find the right book, whether offering suggested reads or tracking down the right title based on a half-remembered description. “Every day here is different. I realized I didn’t want to sit behind a desk all day,” she said.

Estep’s mother (Besse’s sister) has been a longtime Carmichael’s employee and Estep herself has been working at the store on and off since she was 14, dusting shelves and learning the fundamentals of the retail business at an early age. “Although we are new owners and we’re still fairly young, we have a lot of experience and that’s a good thing,” Estep said.

Established in a city that still makes a lot of its own stuff, Carmichael’s Bookstore — now expanded to two locations and a children’s shop — has a reputation for knowledgeable employees, community involvement and strong support of area authors. “I think the ‘buy local’ movement is thriving here in Louisville and I think it’s growing across the country,” said Blankenship.

The older Carmichael’s Bookstore at 1295 Bardstown Road recently had a growth spurt as well. Last fall, the store expanded into the space left by an adjacent Heine Brothers’ coffee shop that moved across the street. Even with the additional square footage, the Bardstown Road store is still packed with a wide selection of new books, magazines, greeting cards and literary-themed gift items like T-shirts, tote bags, buttons and fabric Sylvia Plath and Zora Neale Hurston dolls.

The store windows are papered with posters advertising the busy Carmichael’s events calendar, which includes several author appearances and a book club gathering each month — usually held over at the larger store at 2720 Frankfort Ave. The schedule has also included poetry readings, a watch party for “The Great American Read” series on PBS, a musician’s book-and-album signing at a nearby record store and chats with children’s books illustrators.

“People are craving some of that nondigital world and bookstores are providing that, but we also have to make sure we’re modernizing and keeping up with trends,” Estep said. Carmichael’s Bookstore now programs about 250 events a year in its shops and around town.

For young readers, Carmichael’s Kids (at 1313 Bardstown Road) has a healthy selection of children’s books, toys and gifts. One of the store’s picture windows, furnished with pillows and a large stuffed Clifford the Big Red Dog, serves as a “book nook” for in-house sampling. “We do two ‘story times’ a week,” said Blankenship, who said the company also coordinates author readings and book fairs at schools.

Located along streets dotted with restaurants and other small businesses, the Carmichael’s stores have a relaxed, neighborhood feel about them that appeals to the serious book browser out for a morning stroll — or the occasional bus full of tourists spilling out to go shopping. “We’ve always been supported by the community,” said Blankenship. “We were one of the founding members of our local independent business alliance.”

Taking over a long-established family enterprise gives the new owners a chance to put their own stamp on the stores, but they say they don’t have major plans to change a lot of things. “We appreciate and what has obviously been a successful way of doing business for 40 years,” Estep said, “and we think about how we can bring that forward with us and our generation.”

While the founders have largely retired, they haven’t completely stepped away from the family business, whether it be consulting or something more hands-on. As Blankenship noted, “my dad will pick up shifts if we need coverage.”

Where the Family Business Is Selling Books

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — To outsiders, Kentucky’s largest city may be best known for its active bourbon distilleries, a baseball bat factory, famous fried chicken and a certain horse race run the first Saturday in May, but just ask someone there where to buy a book. “Carmichael’s,” said one longtime resident, “is a Louisville institution.”

Where the family business is selling books

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J.D. Biersdorfer

Articles written by the author

Where to Find Native American Culture and a Good Read

Where the Thirst for Literature Meets the Thirst for Beer

Where the family business is selling books