On Independent Bookstore Day’s Tenth Anniversary, Cleveland Shops Celebrate Their Niches

When the American Booksellers Association hosted its first Independent Bookstore Day on the last April weekend of 2013, the indie store was on somewhat of a rebound.

Amazon and its resulting e-book craze was flooding the market with more efficient ways to both buy and consume literature, and, as a result, the market for books from brick and mortars looked dim.

Then, in 2014, something strange happened. While nearly a quarter of Britain and Ireland’s stores went under in the previous five years, the U.S.’ grew a resounding 27 percent. The reason is what Saturday’s literary holiday seems to celebrate at its core: the triumphant resilience of the indie store’s uniqueness.

“Bookstores with niches tend to do better,” Cathryn Siegal-Bergman, the owner of Clevo Books in the 5th Street Arcades, said. “And that’s why there are still so many indies around, is because we all specialize in something or other. And I think that’s true for the Cleveland bookstores, too. I think we’re all sort of spread apart, which is nice, and everybody seems to have a focus.

Like Clevo, which specializes in the sale of books in translation, Cleveland’s assortment of independents are both celebrating not just ten years of a manufactured holiday but a decade of growing each one’s character as it relates to the city’s scene.

“They’re part of the fabric of the neighborhood, staffed by booksellers who know books and their customers,” Celeste Ng, the Cambridge-based author of Little Fires Everywhere and 2023 Independent Bookstore Day Ambassador, said in a press release. “And shopping locally supports our communities as well as the people who live there. In an increasingly impersonal world, independent bookstores are an antidote to feeling disconnected and dehumanized.”

Along with the usual discount tables and literary fanfare. At Mac’s Backs, live face painting coincides with a storewide 10-percent off sale. At Loganberry, there’s a raffle and readings by Cliff Anthony and Quartez. At Visible Voice, which thrived during Covid-19 due to its private parties, attendees can sip Libro Limonatas while participating in a literary scavenger hunt.

At Index Coffee & Books, a recent rebranding of Horizontal Books on West 25th in 2008, Saturday will bring a verifiable testing of the coffee shop owner David Kellevig installed earlier this year.

Along with the expected crowds, Kellevig’s curious to see how his stock will change over the few months, as Index recently put a pause on online orders. The intention, Kellvig told Scene, was to encourage niche-seeking customers—”like those intrigued by Texas gardening”—to visit the brick and mortar.

“Now we can really focus on, I guess, the quality of the book rather than the price of the book online,” he said. “You know, the weird online things.”

For Cathryn Siegal-Bergman, who celebrated the one-year anniversary of Clevo Books in early April, Independent Bookstore Day brings a sort of reckoning with Clevo’s expanding identity in the local market, along with tables of discounted texts for sale.

After a year in business, with in-store shelves nearing their capacity, with her interest in hosting readings or book clubs burgeoning, Siegal-Bergman sees the remainder of 2023 focused on, possibly, hunting for a bigger space.

“We’re bursting at the seams here,” she said.

Although profits aren’t as nice as they were in 2022, she expects a move to an area with higher foot traffic—she’s thinking about Euclid Ave.—could signal a big turnaround by next year’s celebration.

“I mean, this has been kind of an experiment to see what kind of reception we would get for our niche and being in this space,” she said, sitting on a couch at Clevo, across from coworker Marc Lansley and cat Minty. “Initially, I thought it would be big enough to do all the things that we wanted to do, because I also wasn’t aware that we could build an infinite library of books and translation.”

“I kind of was,” Lansley quipped. He looked around the room. “I kind of stopped counting last year.”

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This article appears in Apr 19 – May 3, 2023.