By Jill Riddell
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A young boy with blond hair, long eyelashes, and a grasshopper in his hand pushed open the door. He trotted back to a man at the counter, showing him the bug. “I need to get some grass for him to eat,” he explained, and the man obligingly walked outside with him to find some. Meanwhile the woman had done a search of her own for butterflies and spiders, and offered me a stack of selected materials.
Nancy Fagin owns the store and runs it with her husband, Ron Weber. They receive moral support from their grasshopper-loving nine-year-old, Nathan. Nancy studied anthropology at the University of Illinois at Champaign in the 1970s, and after a brief stint in graduate school there left to work for a publishing house. She opened N. Fagin Books in 1980, starting out in a 200-square-foot space on the 13th floor of an office building in the Loop and moving to this location, an 800-square-foot space at 1039 W. Grand, in 1988. “When we moved here it seemed so huge and spacious,” she says. Her implication is that it doesn’t feel that way to her now, and I understand what she means: books on the shelves have begun to lie crosswise on top of the ones arranged side by side. Others haven’t made it onto shelves at all and sit in deep piles on the floor.
But there aren’t many political books in the store. “I may have a book on the lives of seals on Baffin Island, but I probably won’t have a book on the politics of killing seals,” Nancy says. “The books here give information from which you can draw your own conclusions.”
