Turning the Page: The Start of Bookends Under the Ownership of MFA Student Madden Aleia
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By Sophia Apteker '23
Madden Aleia sold her first book as the third owner of Bookends on Halloween of last year—even though the shop itself was closed.
A prospective customer came in when she was signing papers to finalize her purchase of the inventory and assets of the store in Northampton, Mass., and asked if they could buy a book. Since the shop had been closed for two and a half years and Aleia didn’t have the heart to send him away, she allowed him to look around. He ended up buying a book about “My Neighbor Totoro.” Aleia gave him change out of her wallet.
Thus began the soft launch of Bookends, a time during which the bookstore opened while it was simultaneously being reorganized.
“People kept walking by and would try to come in,” Aleia recalled. “I was like, ‘This is silly. Why wait? Why have a big grand opening?’ So there wasn’t actually a big grand opening. I just opened it while I was working on it so that people could come in.”
Aleia is in her final semester in the MFA for Prose at UMass Amherst, where she is also currently teaching English 354: Creative Writing at the university. Prior to UMass, she graduated from Smith College where she earned a degree in American Studies while pursuing a poetry concentration.
Words, art, and community have always been of interest to Aleia. Through her teenage and college years, she found herself returning to jobs at bookstores and antique stores across the Pioneer Valley area and near where she grew up in Connecticut.
“It seemed like a practical and exciting thing to do because it was an exciting scavenger-hunt, hunting-and-gathering, doing-things constant stimulation game,” said Aleia in regards to her work. “It was also a setting where you could make a lot of geriatric friends, which was the biggest perk. It was something that I was exposed to, interested in, curious about, and really enjoyed a lot of my work with.”
On Thursday through Sunday, you can find Aleia buzzing around the two-story shop: pricing books, sorting them, evaluating their conditions, determining where they go. On Wednesday, you can find her forming meaningful connections with students at UMass.
“The students are phenomenal,” Aleia said. “The conversations that happen among my undergraduate students are even cooler and more nuanced than the graduate students. There is something so rewarding about being able to be in a classroom setting when there is good faith and genuine interest in the material.”
Outside of work, Aleia enjoys singing and playing guitar with her band, Thee Holy Oaken String Band, in the basement of Bookends, where a shell in the back of the storage area exerts an eerie resonance and distinct sonic textures. She’s drawn to songs about ecology or labor organizations, or songs with queer or gendered undertones.
These thematic interests are reflected in the types of books that she stocks in the store. Over the past five months, Bookends has cultivated a section of new inventory (in an environment of predominantly used inventory) that is complete with experimental fiction, fiction in translation, queer studies, political economy, and Marxist criticism.
“I think it was a store that always had an eclectic selection, with respect to literature and the arts,” Aleia said. “I think it’s gotten even more eclectic, and it’s definitely gotten a harder lefty-bend to it.”
Aleia admits that it was a bit overwhelming to open the store while also juggling so many other things, but she’s grateful to be where she is.
From UMass in particular, Aleia has valued the community that the MFA program has given her. For example, after her classmate Yvette Lisa Ndlovu wrote a series of Afro-futuristic short stories called “Drinking from Graveyard Wells,” Aleia was able to host their book launch at her store.
“I want Bookends to have the types of conversations that I wish happened more in The Academy, that are more community based dialogues that also have a level of thoughtfulness to them,” Aleia said. “I went to school and wished that the conversations were happening in a more communicative and engaged and interpersonally thoughtful way. I also felt like, ‘Why are we viewing school as a place to have good conversations about work? What if there’s a place that’s not a school where this can happen?’”
Aleia hopes that Bookends can be an inclusive place to host these dialogues, where anyone can be serious but also enjoy themselves.
“My dream for Bookends is for it to be a place that people can gather and have joyful, exciting conversations about work, books, media, music, movies, everything,” Aleia said. “I want it to be accessible to people, to be welcoming, to be encouraging.”
Bookends is located at 80 Maple St in Northampton, Massachusetts. It is open from 1 p.m. to 7 p.m. on Wednesday through Friday and 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday. You can learn more about Bookends by checking out their website.