Wicker Park’s Underworld Used Books, a storefront operation with erratic hours on a scruffy stretch of Ashland, is closing its doors after just over two years in business. But that doesn’t bother proprietor Michael Workman: “From the beginning the store was never meant to be a long-term thing.”
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“When we first moved in,” says Workman, “it was almost beyond repair.” It took almost five months of toil between day jobs and classes at Northwestern, where he’s finishing up his BA in English, but eventually “it was habitable.” He stocked the shelves with books from his own library and opened for business in March of 1998.
“I felt really good about selling books,” he continues, “especially right here, because we’d get people in who probably stop in a bookstore once a year. So we’d sell books to people who otherwise wouldn’t have bought them. And I would sell them for cheap. There were a lot of times I’d even let people walk out without paying for books. I’d just give them to them.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Jim Newberry.
