Mt. Airy turns a page: new bookstore to open

by PAMELA ROGOW

Seven thousand books are coming our way, thanks to Sheila Avelin of West Mt. Airy. Her Big Blue Marble Bookstore is scheduled for grand opening on Saturday, Nov. 12, with a post-script celebration in mid-December when the in-store café is completed. By spring, an outdoor terrace will complete the vision of Sheila’s first retail enterprise at 551 Carpenter Lane, between Lincoln Drive and Greene Street.

Look for a general purpose bookstore — with attitude. Its book collection will resonate with what Sheila describes as the “three axes of integration” along which Mt. Airy is organized: black/white, lesbian/straight and Jewish/otherwise.

Actually, the store’s Stroller Parking area, just inside the door, attests to a more universal organizing principle of local and global society: adult/child. “More and more young families are moving into this neighborhood,” she says, herself the mother of eight-month-old Zivia and a life-long kid-lit buff.

Notably multi-cultural and progressive — “like Mt. Airy” — Big Blue Marble will feature adult fiction, kids, African-American, gay and lesbian, Jewish themes, poetry, graphic novels, education and wellness, memoirs and perhaps the best “alternative pregnancy” section in the city. An “umbrella” area will cover sustainable living writ large: ecology, globalization and the end of oil energy, organic gardening and the like.

All the more inviting, the café will serve fair-traded teas and coffees, purchased directly from farmers when possible, as well as bagels and fresh pastries.

Raised in Washington, D.C., Sheila pursued Women’s Studies at Harvard and worked in schools in Philadelphia and Madison, Wisconsin. She came to appreciate Mt. Airy while earning a graduate degree in English at the University of Pennsylvania.
By spring of 2003, Sheila decided to search along Germantown Avenue for a store site. But luck has its way, and the commercially zoned two-story brick building next door to her home on Carpenter Lane went up for sale the next year. (Another axis of local life, owner/renter, may be overlooked in Sheila’s schema but hers still works best for a local-in-the-best-sense bookstore.)
She purchased the brick building, between Greene Street and Lincoln Drive, in February ’04, with project completion delayed somewhat by the permit peregrinations that Philadelphia is famous for, not to mention the arrival of her first child, Zivia, eight months ago.

With DC’s Politics & Prose and Madison’s Rainbow bookstores as her models, Sheila is hiring a staff of 10 half-timers and two three-quarter-time managers. Including herself, that’s at least a dozen people to service a store that will be open seven days a week.
Beyond books and food, the Blue Marble will regularly host an ambitious schedule of club meetings, weekly poetry readings and children’s story time in a comfy community room outfitted with couches and upholstered chairs. Painted in calm (and non-toxic) blues, greens and teals, the Big Blue Marble Bookstore promises to grow into a major player in the community’s cultural life.
Fortunately, Sheila harbors not just print but patience. “It takes a lot of books to fill the shelves, and bookstores tend not to break even until the third or fourth year. Even in the fourth or fifth year, profit is very small — a couple hundred dollars perhaps. Bookstores require a bigger investment than many start-ups,” she explains.

So what is it that drives Sheila Avelin to make such an investment? Simply put, she loves that whole worlds can open up between two covers, whether that is someone’s vivid imagination or the sum of a lifetime’s expertise or experience. She also loves this community.

In many ways, Sheila’s childhood presaged her emergence as a Mt. Airy indie bookstore proprietor. Childhood friends, not far off the mark, expected her to become a librarian. And though raised by Episcopalians, Sheila grew up among many Jews. “My parents are both lawyers for nonprofits,” she explains elliptically. After an interlude as an atheist, she converted during college to Judaism. She came out as a lesbian during college as well.

The Big Blue Marble Bookstore is located just off the intersection where Weavers Way Co-op, the Moving Arts Studio and Henry School meet, and the new High Point Café serves crepes, coffee and freshly made pastries. Sheila calls the corner a destination, all the more vital with her new bookstore. For more information, call 215-844-1870.