Signing has been cancelled

Due to a family emergency Jeanette de Beauvoir will not be able to have a reading and signing on June 25th.  Sorry if you had planned to attend.

Free book signing for Asylum June 25th

Jeannette de Beauvoir will be at After-Words books on June 25th from 5:30 pm talking about and signing copies of her book Asylum (St. Martin’s, Hardback, $25.99).

Asylum delves back to the 1950s, when orphanages in Montreal and elsewhere were converted to asylums in order to gain more funding. The children were subjected to horrific experiments such as lobotomies, electroshock therapy, and psychotropic medication, and many of them died in the process. The survivors were supposedly compensated for their trauma by the government and the cases seem to have been settled. Ms. De Beauvoir will discuss the story and the research behind it.

Ms. De Beauvoir’s work has been translated into 12 languages and has appeared in 15 countries. She explores personal and moral questions through historical fiction, mysteries, and mainstream fiction. She grew up in Angers, France, but now divides her time between Cape Cod and Montréal. Read more at www.jeannetteauthor.com

After-Words Books is located at 23 East Illinois Street in Chicago, IL.

For more information, please contact: Beverly Dvorkin, After-Words Books 312-464-1110

Calendar, Updates and Closings...

QUICK REFERENCE CALENDAR

• ·         April 28 & 29   CLOSED FOR NEW WINDOW INSTALLATION
• ·         May 1    BEGIN BUYING BOOKS FOR STORE CREDIT, 25 OR LESS, ANY DAY ANY TIME 
• ·         May 5    BEGIN ACCEPTING APPOINTMENTS FOR CASH BOOK BUYING (SMALLER QUANTITES AT A TIME PREFERRED).  ALSO, BEGIN ACCEPTING APPOINTMENTS FOR LARGER QUANTITY STORE CREDIT BOOK BUYING.

Dear after-words customers:

Thank you so much for your patience with us as we have gone through this re-modeling period.

We have now been open for about 6 weeks in our renovated space.  We still have some details to work out, but get more comfortable every day in our re-configured digs.

Unfortunately, as often happens when you do this kind of work, we hit a few bumps along the way.  We were unable to have our new front doors and windows installed during the month we were closed.  It was simply too cold outside. 

So, we will have to be closed again as our front doors and windows get the same kind of face-lift that the rest of the space got.  The good news is, this time it will only be for two days. 

We will be CLOSED on Tuesday April 28^th and Wednesday April 29^th for this work to be completed.  Again, my apologies.

The other bump we hit was concerning the installation of a new coffee bar by Bowtruss.  There are a lot of plumbing challenges in buildings as old as the one we occupy, so we have been working towards that goal.  But we are not there, yet.  Still, the coffee bar will be coming.  We hope it will be open sometime in June.  If it doesn’t happen by then, we look forward to welcoming them whenever the details can be sorted out.

For those of you who have sold us books in the past, you will be happy to know that we will be resuming our buying as of May 1^st.  Most of our guidelines are remaining the same – in terms of what we buy and the condition we expect the books we buy to be in.  The major changes are to when we buy.

We will no longer be running our Thursday round-ups for cash book buying.  In fact, cash buying will now be by appointment only.  The good news is, there will be more appointments available than there were before.  Also, appointments will be accepted for small quantities of books as well as for larger quantities.  Smaller quantities would be our preference.  Keep in mind, if you choose to sell less books at a time, but do so more frequently, you will get in a lot faster.

As for those of you who are selling for store credit, you can still bring them in at any time during our store hours – provided that you bring in 25 books or less each time.   Again, we prefer the smaller number of books per visit.  But if you want to do more than 25 all at once, we can make appointments for you as well.

Lastly, as part of our renovations, our new shared event space has been completed.  It is run by Space by Doejo, a group that also runs the fifth floor of our building and will soon take over the second floor as well.  They have already had all kinds of events back there – everything from hack-a-thons to pop-up restaurants and conferences.  We will also be hosting authors again beginning in June, as well as doing our charity book sale and other kinds of readings and events.  So stay tuned for more on that.  If you love the new event space as much as we do, consider it for your own parties.  In conjunction with Space, we can rent it to you.  Just contact us for more information if you are interested.

By the way – we have LOTS of boxes left over from our renovation period.  Some are even unused.  Contact us for details if you are interested in buying any.

Thanks for reading all of this.  I hope you are as excited by the changes at after-words as we are.  And thanks for remaining patient while we continue to get our act together.

Beverly Dvorkin

Store Owner

Reopening March 9th

Sorry for the delay, but we finally have a date for our soft reopening.  We will see you on March 9th between the hours of 10:30 am and  10 pm.  From that point forward we will be returning to our regular store hours as listed on our website.

The reason this is a "soft" reopening is that we still have some work to do on the upper level, so you will still see some piles of boxes, and empty walls.  Sadly, it is all the children's books and so our younger readers will have to wait a little bit longer.  Our basement is finished and about 90% of our books are available for perusal.

The coffee bar is not in place yet either.  We hope to update you before the end of the month on that front.

Lastly, we are ready to sell you books, but we are not ready to buy yours quite yet.  We have some work to as you will see, so we thank you in advance for your cooperation.

Thanks for all of your support during the past month as we have been getting ourselves organized.  To those of you who helped us during this process, a thousand thank yous.  We could not have done it without you.

We look forward to welcoming you back!

We are getting there...

The floors are finished.  The glass wall is going in today.  We have arranged the basement the way we want and most of the books are in their new homes.  We won't be open March 1st but we don't think it will be too much longer.  Thank you so very much for all your patience and support.

after-words

New Floor is In!

All the wood is down and it just needs to be sanded and sealed.  Up next, the coffee bar...

New floors are almost done!

Things are falling into place and the new floors are almost done.