Reading After Work, 57th Street Bookstore, Chicago
Hyde Park, with the University of Chicago, is a neighborhood that values books and values the ideas that books embody. This provides for a strong neighborhood bookstore that reflects the readership’s organic mix of ideas and cultures with an academic bent. Our tagline has been “Where serious readers go for fun.” But we really are the neighborhood bookstore for the South Side of Chicago. We try to serve as many kinds of readers as we can, … not just from a sales standpoint, but also because the South Side is in many ways neglected by the larger city. Building that sense of community—that sense of who we are in all of our diversity—I’d be thrilled if 57th Street and the Co-op can play a larger role in that.
–Thomas Flynn
manager, 57th Street Books, Chicago