After several years of travelling around Portage County, the mobile independent bookstore Books a Go Go has found a permanent home, opening its doors to a brick-and-mortar store on Aug. 30 at 220 Main Street in Ravenna.
“It has been everything I wanted it to be, plus some. I have loved the response of everybody, and I am happy to be here,” Owner Kathy Klein told The Weekly Villager on Sep. 25. “It is a great place and lots of people will just stop in to say hi or I read about you somewhere or saw you somewhere online.”
Kleinman, a recently retired preschool teacher at the Southeast Cooperative Nursery School, had operated Books A Go Go as a pop-up bookstore around Portage County for the last three years, frequently attending local events in the area including Ravenna, Garrettsville and Kent. After she retired from teaching for 18 years at the Nursery School, she decided to make her side business more permanent.
Even as a pop-up bookstore that she usually operated in her spare time, Books A Go Go had amassed quite a following as there were very few independent bookstores in the area and she offered almost every genre of book imaginable to her customers.
“There is no bookstore in our area that has all genres of books. When I wanted to go to an independent bookstore, I would have to travel to the Cleveland area to do that,” she noted. “I knew that our area was in need of something like this, so to make sure there was interest, I started as a mobile bookstore.”
Klein, a resident of Edinburg Township, credited her finding a permanent home for Store to Ravenna Developmental Chief Dennis West, who helped secure the venue which was formerly occupied by Silver & Scents, now relocated to Kent.
After operating a business that required her to replenish her stock monthly, Klein has now placed many more orders to her book distributor to update her inventory, as Books A Go Go’s new home has become a popular attraction for Portage County residents.
In addition to having a wide variety of books to choose from, Klein said she has also emphasized creating a welcoming atmosphere.
“Obviously with retail, there are slow days and busy days and I have had those already, but there are still people that are ready to shop books,” she said. “It was somewhere they could gather and have a chat and visit.”
Books A Go Go is also hosting several author chats in the coming months, story time for children, and will have a monthly yoga class called Balance Among the Books taking place soon.
For Klein, reading has always been a passion of hers since she was a child, taken in by the popular series “Little House on the Prairie” and then reading novels by acclaimed horror novelist Stephen King when she was in eighth grade. She attributed her love of reading to the help of her sister, who taught her how to read.
After moving to Edinburg Township in 1995 from Youngstown with her husband, she changed career paths from being a social worker to working part-time at Walden Books at the Chapel Hill Mall in Akron and then became a manager of Borders Books & Music in Cuyahoga Falls for several years.
After taking a break from the workforce, Klein returned to full-time work as a preschool teacher at the Southeast Cooperative Nursery School, teaching children at the beginning of their literary journey.
“Doing preschool during the day was fine and we had a great library at the preschool so we would always do story time throughout the day,” she said. “We had librarians come in to do story time and the kids loved books, they always soak that up.”
In the course of Klein’s life, she assembled a book collection ranging from 500 to 700 books, which is made up of books primarily purchased from library book sales and independent bookstores that she found throughout the Northeast Ohio region, which makes up a home library at her house.
Although the Books A Go Go store has only been in existence for a month, Klein said that she has found the perfect permanent site for her business, residing in a community that thrives on locally and independently owned businesses.
“I actually really like that, even though this is downtown Ravenna, and it is considered a city, it is not extremely busy,” she noted. “I actually like being somewhere a little quieter but that still has plenty of business.”
