Katie McGrath
Thoughtfully displayed titles join low-key cafe and community space at this idyllic bookstore.
Spring Green’s Arcadia Books has just finished its fifth summer, during those years growing from experiment to institution in this village of 1,600.
Many Madisonians who discovered it during visits to nearby American Players Theatre have since made Arcadia a destination in itself. The store offers a carefully chosen inventory of new books and back titles as well as a cafe featuring locally sourced and organic items. The menu includes sandwiches, salads, wraps and noodles, as well as hot soups and entrées that can be reheated.
Katie McGrath
The warm red brick building in the heart of Spring Green’s main street features huge windows; the historic Gard Theater is across the way. Arcadia patrons find the space bright and airy in the summer, close and comforting in the winter. It also has the original maple floor, wonderfully creaky.
Perhaps because of that classic bookstore ambience, Arcadia has become an unlikely stop for big-name authors promoting their work, including David Axelrod and The New Yorker’s Mary Norris.
The shop was started in 2011 by two veterans of American Players Theatre. James Bohnen had worked in Chicago theater for 14 years and “was just about fed up with it,” he says. He enjoyed Spring Green, except for one notable omission. “When I first started directing at APT in 1996, I just kept saying to people, why doesn’t this place have a bookstore? It seems like such an obvious place.”
Bohnen continues to direct at APT. In 2005, he bought a house in town. A few years later a commercial property became available on the town’s main street: an 1872 building that had served over the decades as a post office, grocery, sit-down deli and flower shop.
“I had, from the time I was 25, fallen in love with the idea of having a bookstore at some time in some place,” Bohnen recalls. He had no experience in the book business or even in retail. But he felt that the building and its location were part of a message. It was “a universe kind of thing: If you want to do this, do this. Otherwise shut up about it.”
Katie McGrath
So he did it. But not by himself. Just as every theater director needs a stage manager, this bookstore needed a restaurateur. She also happened to be one of APT’s stage managers. (Both still work with the theater.)
“As he was converting the space into a bookstore, many people in the community said to him, ‘You’ve got to have food. You have to open a restaurant,’” says Jacki Singleton, who had sideline as a personal chef. “So he called me one day and said, ‘Would you be interested in doing the food?’ Well, how can you turn down an opportunity like that!”
What makes it work so well? The two share a common interest in what, in this Amazon age, is becoming all too rare: the lost art of browsing.
“We talked about a lot of different [business] models when we opened, James and I, and what we kept coming to was — we wanted something just like the bookstore is,” she says. “The book that you want is the book beside the book that you thought you wanted. So the idea is that if you come in for a chicken salad sandwich, for example, there’s some Korean dish that you’ve never had but you’ve always wanted to try right next to it.” n
Arcadia Books, 102 E. Jefferson St., Spring Green, 608-588-7638, readinutopia.com
