Collective Keeps Never Ending Books Alive

On Friday evening, Elena Augusewicz, Peter Cunningham, Jared Emerling, Jessica Larkin-Wells, Conor Perreault, and Charli Taylor — a.k.a. six of the Never Ending Books Collective — met in the storefront at 810 State St. They talked about how the beloved bookstore, music spot, and community space, which announced it was ending its decades-long run in December, may turn out not to be ending after all.

“There’s so much history, love, and community in here, and we wanted to carry on in that spirit,” Augusewicz said.

“There was a lady outside just now dancing” when she saw the lights on inside Never Ending Books, Perreault said. ​“There’s all this goodwill and history in this place, a flow of books and ideas.” There is also a flow of cash; since the collective officially announced it was planning to keep the space running, a Kickstarter campaign to raise money to cover the first months of rent has raised over $10,000.

For decades, under the ownership and guidance of Roger Uihlein, Never Ending Books served as a free bookstore, a stage for New Haven’s experimental music scene, and place for several different communities to gather, from drum circles to poetry groups to film aficionados. Uihlein had mentioned the possibility of closing the space for years, and finally made it official late last fall. It triggered an outpouring of fond remembrances from the New Haven arts community, as well as grief at losing the space.

As a commenter on the Independent’s December article about its closing noted, ​“between this closing and whatever has happened/will happen with Lyric Hall in Westville, New Haven is losing outposts for small-scale unaffiliated culture events. Here’s hoping for some post-pandemic phoenixes rising from these ashes.”

In January, artist and musician Sam Moth stirred those ashes. She ​“got the ball rolling,” Taylor said, by sending out emails to dozens of people she knew had been involved in Never Ending Books, as artists, musicians, or organizers. She organized Zoom meetings to see about the possibility of forming a collective to keep the space running — taking on the lease and carrying on the activities in the space. Dozens of people attended the first meeting. As talks continued, and people seriously assessed just how much time and energy they had to devote to the project, the group get smaller. That turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

“There were too many cooks in the kitchen,” Emerling said. ​“The people in this room right now are who kept logging on.” The collective counts four more people — Jules Bakes, Jordanna Packtor, Bob Gorry, and Pam Patterson — among its members.

The group members didn’t really know each other before participating in the effort to keep Never Ending Books alive, but ​“at least weekly meetings” have resulted in a dynamic in which they now finish one another’s sentences. ​“It’s been cool to see how well this group works together,” Larkin-Wells said. Together, Augusewicz said, the six have become a team, throwing in energy and ideas.

The group acknowledged many times their admiration, even adoration, for Uihlein for running Never Ending Books himself for years. ​“It’s amazing how much he’s done for so long,” Taylor said. In summing up what the collective is seeking to accomplish, Augusewicz said ​“because of Roger, it’s possible.”

But the storefront’s origins began with a collective, and especially in startup mode, ​“one person can’t do everything,” Augusewicz said. With the collective in place, no one has to. ​“The real Never Ending Books are the friends we made along the way,” Perreault deadpanned.

Collectively, the group has experience and expertise to draw from in revitalizing the space. Augusewicz, for example, is an executive assistant at Common Ground, where she works on fundraising, event planning, project management, and social media outreach. Cunningham works in marketing and copywriting for Yale’s communications office, does work for the Democratic Socialists, and performs sketch comedy. Emerling works as a brand manager at Two Roads Brewing Company. Larkin-Wells does manual labor, most recently at a small factory in Northford but now transitioning to farm work for the season. Perreault is a systems librarian at Gateway Community College and organized a series of shows at Never Ending Books in past years. and Taylor works as a gallery tech at Yale’s architecture school and does, as another member put it, ​“a lot of community organizing” (“that takes up most of my time,” Taylor said).

As Augusewicz put it, ​“we make it work.”

The group has first gotten to work in creating more open space in the half of the storefront dedicated to the books. Before, the space was a catacomb of bookshelves, with books jamming the shelves and more books in stacks in front of them. The collective has removed, by their estimation, probably three-quarters of the stock, leaving a much smaller collection that still means the walls are lined, floor to ceiling, with books, with a couple bookcases in the room, spaced as you’d find in a bookstore.

The collective has also put energy into its fundraising campaign to cover expenses in the first months of operation. ​“The landlord and property manager have been very flexible and open to our interest in continuing Never Ending Books. But we will need to sign a lease and pay rent. Sooner than later!” Cunningham wrote on the collective’s Kickstarter page. ​“When you donate to Never Ending Books Collective, you are contributing to rent, security deposit, and utility expenses.”

The funds raised — over $10,000 and counting, of an originally stated $12,500 goal — will allow the collective to ​“feel some security over the next year,” said Emerling, while it works on formalizing the operation. ​“It’s the basic, absolutely bottom-dollar rent money,” Augusewicz said. But it will give the collective enough time to first set up Never Ending Books as an LLC and then transition to being a nonprofit — the legal framework that best fits Uihlein’s community-grounded approach to running the space.

“This place had never been about turning a profit,” Emerling said. ​“That’s not why people got involved.” Formalizing the operation as a nonprofit will ​“help protect it, give it a backbone.” Augusewicz agreed. ​“We want to make sure it’s super-sustainable, so we don’t lose this prime, amazing space in downtown New Haven.” The location is important, especially as development in downtown New Haven has tended to make places less inclusive, accessible, and affordable for the arts community. Meanwhile — and speaking from her experience at Common Ground — Augusewicz said, ​“people are always looking for a space to gather outside their houses.” The collective is also inspired by Best Video, which successfully moved from video store to nonprofit cultural center and mainstay of the New Haven arts scene.

The funds will also allow the collective to hang onto the space even as pandemic restrictions mean that it can’t hold events that would bring it income. But as vaccinations progress and Covid-19 restrictions hopefully lift, allowing small groups to gather in the space — in the first year ​“we can go through our crazy ideas,” Emerling joked, to see what works the best, what the existing Never Ending Books community still wants from the space, and what future directions may lay in store.

The collective plans, first of all, to implement regular hours when the storefront is open, featuring ​“a curated selection of used books for sale” as well as ​“a selection of art, literature, comix, zines, and more from local creators,” as Cunningham wrote for the Kickstarter campaign. The members also plan to use the room as a rotating gallery space for artwork. They will reach out to small local business ventures — especially ​“people who don’t have access to a storefront,” Larkin-Wells said — to create pop-up shops there, either inside the space or as a sidewalk sale. Uihlein himself plans to continue putting energy into Never Ending Books as a bookshop, with pop-ups and other iterations of the project both inside and outside of the original storefront. (Technically, Never Ending Books and the Never Ending Books Collective will be two separate entities, with the stock of books remaining Uilhein’s domain and the storefront itself being the province of the collective, though clearly there will be much collaboration.) In a general sense, they plan to form relationships with other organizations in town to find ways to work together, such as to hold events or community meetings. And, of course, once pandemic restrictions lift, the collective plans to bring back the music shows, poetry readings, and other gatherings that made Never Ending Books a hub for New Haven’s cultural scene. As all the members pointed out, their first experience of the space — and the way they formed a connection with it — was through a show.

And as Larkin-Wells put it, ​“all of these things we’re talking about have occurred in the past,” in the history of the storefront. Uihlein ​“has been doing it for decades. We just have the internet on our side.”

The plan, Emerling said, is also ​“designed to change over time.” The collective extends an invitation for anyone to get involved. This open-ended, and open-minded, sense of what the space can be is very much in keeping with how Uihlein ran it. It’s ​“what makes this an interesting place,” Taylor said, and is at the heart of how Never Ending Books built up the goodwill and the following it has.

And much of that is attached to the storefront itself, Perreault pointed out. Early in the discussions Moth started in January, there was a question as to whether the arts community could let the space go, wait out the pandemic, and then start something else in a new space. For the members of the collective, that wasn’t an option. ​“There’s a history, there’s a vibe to here, that people who have been here recognize,” Perreault said.

“This isn’t coming from nothing,” Emerling said. ​“It’s an evolution.”

As their fundraising campaign moves steadily toward its goal — 153 backers, from New Haven, across the state, to New York, Boston, and Cleveland, to as far away as Germany, the Netherlands, and India, have already contributed — the collective has been feeling the strong support of the community that shares its sense of wanting Never Ending Books to continue.

“We’re so thankful to everyone who has stepped up to pledge,” Augusewicz said. ​“People came out of the woodwork. People care.”

The Never Ending Books Collective is running its Kickstarter fundraising campaign through March 31, and posts regularly on its progress on Instagram and Facebook.