Old Symposium Bookstore

Thanks for visiting our page! I am a veteran of the US Navy Seabees (the Navy’s construction division) living in Peoria, IL, with my wife and two sons. I was recently laid off from a national nonprofit focused on ending homelessness after the organization's federal contracts were cancelled. Our family has decided to take this crisis and turn it into a new adventure. So, we are following our dream and opening a small business and center for community learning and dialogue: Old Symposium Bookstore and Community Institute. Our plan is to sell great books, create a warm public gathering place and offer opportunities for seminar-style community learning and dialogue.

Why a bookstore and community institute?

Short answer (please keep reading for a full sense of the long answer):

A word about the books:

We are going to stock good books. What are good books to us? Books that: enrich the intellectual, personal, and public life of the community; books that balance pleasure, growth, personal expansion and community dialogue; books that challenge us and nourish us. We will have a robust selection of classic and contemporary fiction both from the expanding and evolving western and worldwide canons AND an excellent range of nonfiction works with selections in philosophy, religion, history, art, sociology, education, science, economics, business and politics. Children who read are magical creatures in a magical world. Our kids’ section is going to be a major feature of the shop. We love languages and the shop will too; we hope to make books in several languages available and have a substantive Spanish-language section.

A longer word about learning together:

Old Symposium won’t just be a bookshop but also a seminar-house, a community education center. We want to gather, read together and dialogue about things that matter. To this end, we will offer series of multi-week seminars for adults alongside other educational programming. Our adult seminar offerings will be focused on issues of contemporary interest or topics of enduring interest in history, philosophy, religion, arts, economics, politics and beyond. Seminars will be facilitated by staff, friends, community members or visiting facilitators. We also hope to make available seminar-style education for high schoolers, kids’ programs, and literacy support programming.

The what and why of the seminar approach

What does a seminar look like?

The facilitator, in collaboration with staff, will create a schedule of readings for the seminar. Seminars will be open to the public by registration on a first come, first served basis capped at 10-15 participants. The seminar meetings will last 1 or 2 hours and consist of brief remarks and an opening question from the facilitator. The remainder of the seminar will be dedicated to conversation on the topic and scheduled reading amongst the participants and facilitator.

For potential examples, topics of contemporary interest worthy of a multi-week seminar could include: the homelessness crisis; the US immigration debate; how inflation works; social media and mental health; etc. The goal of our seminars is to learn and dialogue about the depth and complexity of issues we face, not reinforce simplified ideological positions. We are in the business of thinking and learning together, not political advocacy. For examples of seminars focused on enduring interests, topics could include: 19th Century German Philosophy; the Jewish Talmud; the American Civil War; Hindu Epics; American Transcendentalism; the social teachings of the Catholic Church; introductory seminars on philosophy, poetry, economics, etc.; or a seminar could focus on individual thinkers like Socrates, Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, Walt Whitman, Mahatma Gandhi, or Friedrich Hayek.

Why seminars?

We believe healthy democratic communities require the pursuit of understanding and dialogue. The sociologist Francesca Polletta named her book about democratic practices in the Civil Rights Movement, Freedom is an Endless Meeting. Our public impulses in the present tend to send us in two directions, the hyper-personal act of casting one’s vote and the hyper-public act of protest in the street. Most of our actual dialogue then happens online via profoundly impoverished platforms for discussing complex matters of mutual public concern, platforms that are actually diminishing our ability to reason (the ‘new symposium’ you might call it). Our bodies together in conversation are a much more refined communication technology and far more fit for the task at hand (‘the old symposium’ you might call it). Our seminars mark an effort to help restore the meeting as a key embodied site of democratic community and to do it through a process of learning and dialoguing together about issues and traditions that are much bigger than any one of us. The seminar is a meeting that relies on reading. Sometimes people think that what they like is what everyone needs. We may be guilty of this. We like to read and talk about ideas; still, if we were doctors and could write a prescription for the US right now it would be for more reading, more in person meeting, and, as the great John Prine wrote, to blow up your TV (the ones in your pocket and on your wrist too). We live in an age where elites pull the levers of massive media and influence machines that try to tell us what to think, as if all we have the power to do is be swayed in one direction or the other. The local meeting, the local seminar, might just be a place where we can think for ourselves.

A word about the space:

We are currently in the market for a building or leased space and have been attending showings with various brokers. Our goal is to find something in the central city, preferably downtown or in the southern section of the Warehouse District. We would love to co-locate near other awesome community businesses like Casa de Arte, Sous Chef and Soulside among others. Our goal is to create a space that people want to be in, where people feel at home. We plan for a space with tables to talk around, and cozy chairs to settle in with a book and a coffee.

Our Targets:

We hope to build our goal incrementally on Go Fund Me based on how much support people are showing for the project. If we continue to be successful, we'll continue to use the platform to crowdfund as one stream of our development strategy. Here are some of our needs in the near term and overall:

Near term needs to establish a viable base for pursuing other financing sources:

Overall needs:

Other sources under consideration:

Please contact us if you are interested in:

Timeline:

Thanks so much for your support!

Warmly,

Nick and Abbey Mitchell