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Support Volumes Bookcafe & Bookstore

In the four years since we’ve opened our first shop in Wicker Park, we’ve prided ourselves on creating a community hub for the residents of the neighborhood and beyond. We’ve watched your children grow, your families grow, your careers and education change and evolve. We’ve shared intimate stories and you’ve shared them with us. We've even added a store to the bustling Mag Mile at 900N. A bookstore world feels a lot like a family, and we are proud of the family we’ve helped to bring together.

We are so thankful for all of the support you’ve shown us not just in the last few weeks, but in all the years we have been lucky enough to know you. We are thankful for the book and puzzle buying you’ve done in recent weeks to help us pay staff and some bills. However, we’ve done the math (over and over and over again), and the truth of the matter is, that can’t sustain us to pay rents, staff, bills from vendors to supply those books and puzzles, taxes, and all of the other bills that sit unpaid on our desk for the books and gifts that sit idle on our shelves. 

While we have been busy applying to all of the grants and things that we can, it is a bit like gambling, and when we are already in a precarious position with a new landlord (purchased in Fall of  2019) made even more precarious at this juncture. .  If we have to move, we will move, but in the meantime we need to figure out a way to just reopen when the time comes. 

We want to be here forever. We want to see your smiling faces at our monthly farmer’s market bookswaps, at school author events, at book fairs and author signings. We intend to laugh again at our monthly You Joke Like A Girl, and hear some killer new poetry and stories at our Open Mics, Pour One Out and beyond. 

We miss all of the littles at storytime. We miss their hugs and their giggles and terrifying glitter-glued hands. We miss conversations about coffee or over coffee. We miss making your special drinks without you having to ask. We miss the engagements, the weddings, and the book launches for local authors we truly adore. We want another year of Finding Where’s Waldo all over the neighborhood, and we want all of those businesses that hide Waldos every year to be here, too! We miss talking about BOOKS all day every day, and our staff arguing over who gets to read a new book next. 

In short, we miss all of you. We love you, and we realize this is not a fun thing to have to ask. We also know we are wary of taking on more debt, as we have already cashed in every cent we’ve ever earned to keep this dream bookstore life. 

In the meantime, we are still taking orders. We are still getting puzzles. We are still here to chat. We will have more online events and book clubs and all the rest here soon. This has all been A LOT and we are doing our very best just to keep our heads above water. 

You can order books on our website (serving communities for both locations and nationwide) HERE 
or via
our Bookshop affiliate page HERE 
with audiobooks at Libro .fm

10% of all donations will be donated to  Book Industry Charitable Foundation  —BINC—a nonprofit foundation that gives life-sustaining grants to individual booksellers and bookstores across the country facing a crisis. We are in this together, and we want to ensure that bookstores as a whole get out of this alive. 


If you’d rather use $ down the road on your loyalty account, you can do so by purchasing an E Gift Card or Gift Card from our website. 


We have a lot of hope, a lot of love for this community, and believe us when we say we will fight tooth and nail to keep Volumes a part of this community for a long time if we can make it through this.

For more updates, you can always follow our story on facebookinstagram , and twitter.
Donate

Donations 

  • Doug Gustafson
    • $10 
    • 3 yrs
  • Anonymous
    • $5,000 
    • 3 yrs
  • Anonymous
    • $50 
    • 3 yrs
  • Terry Koch
    • $50 
    • 3 yrs
  • Marissa Kuok
    • $50 
    • 3 yrs
Donate

Organizer

Rebecca George
Organizer
Chicago, IL

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