Part chamber of commerce, part study hall, a little bit coffee shop and a little bit living room, Arcadia Books in downtown Spring Green is something special.

“It’s a jewel,” said Natalie Iaury, who has worked at the bookstore since it opened in 2011.

“You have young people coming over from school, hanging out and doing homework. We have our ‘old geezers,’ as they call themselves, who come in every day to have a coffee and chat.

“I tell them they’re solving the world’s problems.”

After the first of the year, owner James Bohnen’s 12-year-old bookshop will close for several months while contractors make structural repairs. The coffee shop inside, Paper Crane, has announced it will not return. Arcadia management is looking for a business to replace it.

“James doesn’t want (the café) to go away. It’s essential to who we are,” Iaury said. The hardest part of the closure will be “not having our people that we talk to, some of them daily, some of them weekly. Seeing them, just making sure they’re OK.”

While the closure will be a strain, repairs to the building are long overdue. Iaury said if a customer spilled a coffee on the floor of the main level, it would seep into the basement. Staffers resorted to putting up tarps.

“My joke was always that it feels like there are elephants above us and they’re going to break right through the ceiling,” Iaury said.

She wasn’t completely wrong. This past spring, a structural engineer estimated that the floor could adequately support just 30% of its current load of “really heavy” books, Iaury said.

“We knew we had a problem, but we didn’t know it was that extensive,” Iaury said. “Now we need a plan to move forward, to make sure our building is safe.”

According to records from the Wisconsin Historical Society, the building at 102 E. Jefferson St. was built in 1872. It was historically the Farington and Kifer General Store, and later housed a flower shop.

Now, there are two apartments above the bookstore. Iaury said repairs to the roof, windows and doors in the apartments has been completed. After the bookstore finishes inventory — and the holiday sales season — contractors will come in, remove the floor, pour cement in the basement and adjust supports.

The store will be closed, and Iaury and other Arcadia staff are going to try to fulfill online and phone book orders out of the portion that’s not under active construction.

Independent bookstores unexpectedly thrived during the pandemic, with online sales jumping 680% in 2020 according to the American Booksellers Association. Iaury said customers from out of town who used to stop in during the summer started buying from them year-round via readinutopia.com, managed by a Canadian software company called Bookmanager.

“Through COVID, we learned how to operate with an online business and not being open to the public,” Iaury said. “It’s definitely not our preference, because our customers are the heartbeat of who we are.”

Crane café

When Arcadia opened, Jacki Singleton, owner of Bananas on Fire catering, ran the café, eventually publishing a cookbook of favorites (“From the Kitchen at Arcadia Books,” 2014). Katie Wyer and Patrick Michaels ran the kitchen for a time, and then five years ago, Jenn Jensen opened Paper Crane.

Jensen worked for Singleton in Arcadia’s early days. She and her husband have four kids, and the family has treated the store as a kind of second home. Her husband has done work on the building; the younger kids come in to work on homework or meet friends, and her older children worked in the store. “The Jensens have infiltrated Arcadia Books,” she joked.  

“My oldest is about to be 24, and she worked on the book side at 14,” Jensen said. “The next one down, Lydia, she worked on the book side for many years and is working here right now during break. … Over the years we’ve been a part of the space.”

Paper Crane filled the gaps when other restaurants were closed, temporarily or permanently (as The Shed did, not long ago). Jensen made soups and pastas, cookies and lattes, stocking the cooler with cheese, wine and grab-and-go salads. 

Deciding not to carry on Paper Crane was a tough decision. The employees could take unemployment, but Jensen had few options as a business owner because the renovation didn’t qualify as a reason for business interruption insurance.

“I was really feeling the stress,” Jensen said. “I needed to let people know what was happening, so they could make decisions … to try unemployment or seek other employment elsewhere.”

On a busy late June weekend in Spring Green, Jensen realized it was all going to be too much.

“It’s obviously a labor of love to be here,” Jensen said. “I had to think whether it was going to be worth the gamble of trying to borrow money in order to stay afloat.”

Jensen would consider selling the café identity, but acknowledged the work is challenging. She cooks, works as a barista, does the books and picks up supplies. With a winter population of about 1,600 in Spring Green, it is often not easy to find staff.

Still, the town values the café, and “it is one of the few sustainable food businesses where we are, in a rural situation,” she said. “There’s so much shifting right now in the food industry … one of the important things for me out here was to make sure that locals could afford it. It takes a lot of energy to constantly be looking at numbers of things and watching margins.

“I’m hoping this can continue to be a space where it’s not just for tourism,” she added, “but for kids after school, and the ROMEO table — the ‘retired old men eating out,’ you know, they want their $2 coffee, to be on a fixed income but see their friends regularly.”

Arcadia has become a spot for “Thank You Note Thursdays,” kids with games and remote workers with laptops. Jensen sometimes facilitates introductions (“Would you mind sharing your table? This person is also writing a book.”)

“There isn’t a rec center out here,” Jensen said. “Not everyone is involved in a church. So having something that’s not a bar where you can spend time or seek out community is just really important. It’s become a beautiful thing.”