Facebook Post from May 28, 2020

Happy 15th birthday, bookstore of my dreams! In this time of closure, on the precipice of a summer like no other, it’s nice to reflect that 15 years ago today, May 28th, 2005, we opened our doors for business! This is our story....

Spring of 2005 was also a blur of a multi-system juggle. My co-owner mom was, in between long shifts at the bookstore, going back and forth along Cape Cod for radiation treatments in the final steps of her months-long fight against breast cancer. My Dad had done the back-breaking work of varnishing the floors of the ENTIRE post-and-beam building and we all accrued many hours painting and preparing. 

The morning of May 28th, the fiction books for authors L-S hadn’t arrived yet and so our entire fiction section was face-out to fill out the shelves. My littlest sister had stayed late with me the night before, shelving and cleaning, and I remember blasting “Mr. Brightside” by the Killers and twirling around crazy-dancing with her until well after midnight. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was coming out that July and we were planning “A Day at Hogwarts” release party in between juggling the day-to-day craziness of opening a bookstore in the busy summer season of a beach town, and our distributor from whom we’d purchased all of our books on a returnable basis went out of business suddenly, leaving us in a financial lurch with absolutely no room for error on inventory.

The months surrounding this opening are still a blur of coffee, family and friends pitching in every-which-way, feeling “behind” on knowing the industry trends at all, deliberating too long over small decisions and making lots of mistakes, tackling the steep learning curves of accounting, graphic design, computer tech, customer service, and how to handle the pushy visitor at the register asking if we were “making money yet” …but they were also months of exhilaration, with the excitement of working with books propelling us along. Every day we held wonderful stories in our hands, and met new customers who became friends. The wonder of reading, meeting authors, talking books with people of all ages and from many parts of the world in our tourism town has only grown over the years.  

Our 15th birthday brings new anxieties: for a summer without large-scale author events (which enable us to continue employing our staff year-round), for a Chatham Main Street without the number of tourists we need to sustain the seasonal economy, for the health of our friends and family and neighbors, staff, colleagues, authors, and customers, for the necessity to think quickly and creatively of contingency plans for many situations simultaneously. This spring has been HARD on small businesses.

We have spent 15 years cultivating the magic of browsing bookshelves for the unexpected surprise. We have staked our livelihoods on the surety that booklovers enjoy browsing REAL books in a charming space, for the chance to overhear another reader or bookseller lighting up describing how much “they LOVED that book!” and that children thrive on the community formed by a Story Time and author and illustrator visits, that it is worth it to pay the publisher’s list price for a book in a real setting that supports the magic of browsing paper books and chatting with real people. As a result, this March, we had to pivot quickly to online sales and social media and leap into the digital fray while also protecting the continuation of our beautiful post-and-beam barn-styled bookstore with its true divided light windows, and cupola, and split staircase with stained glass overlooking the mezzanine on one side. We dearly want Where the Sidewalk Ends Bookstore to weather this current economic and health crisis in order to exist in the surety of the brighter days ahead. 

And so we continue into Summer 2020 filled with hope! The support of online shopping through us at our Bookshop link, as well as our Libro.fm audio link and e-book link at Hummingbird, has been a source of revenue while our doors are closed and locked. The willingness of readers to join onto our Virtual Book Clubs and authors to sign on for Virtual Events has been a balm to the soul on hard days of uncertainty.  

We never would have imagined 15 years ago that by May 28, 2020 we would have hosted hundreds of children at our Fancy Nancy Tea Parties and our Wednesday Story Times on our covered deck, greeted thousands of guests over the years at the Wequassett Resort luncheons, and worked alongside fantastic whip-smart waitstaff colleagues there as well.  We have survived a lightning strike on our busiest day of the summer, tornadoes, an expansion 10 years ago into our Children’s Annex, a global celebrity walking in and not being recognized (ask me sometime in person if you haven't heard this story!), a car battery dying during Chatham’s 4th of July parade in which Ladybug Girl (in costume) saved the day, and a million little humorous anecdotes! That I got to experience them working alongside our “bookstore family” and above all, my amazing mother, is the icing on the cake. While we weren’t  able to celebrate our 15th year today the way we would have wanted to, we are warmed by the support of a community of talented authors and engaged readers near and far that has kept us in business for this long. 

Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for your continued support. 

Caitlin