NEWBURYPORT – Jen Perry opened Illume, the second bookstore in this small city, on National Independent Bookstore Day. On that day, April 29, 2023, the city’s downtown was humming with the annual Art Walk and even more appropriately with the Newburyport Literary Festival.
Her first customer posted about the new bookstore on a local Facebook site and people started showing up in the store. They have been flocking in to experience Illume and meet Jen Perry ever since.
The shop at 10 Market Square took the space previously occupied by The Irish Shop, which consolidated with its sister shop in Portsmouth, and the Face Food Natural Beauty Market, which moved to the Tannery looking for a larger space.
“I got lucky,” Perry said, not just to find a prominent location in downtown Newburyport, but to be in that building, which she said has a wonderful landlord and is filled with residents and other business owners who are have formed their own community.
“We look out for each other,” she said.
Perry, who had no retail store experience, created Illume, short for illumination, to be a store she would like to visit. She wanted it to be a place people shop at even when they are not looking for a new book to read, although there are lots of choices among the approximately 700 books.
She strives to make the shop an experience with books, but also art and games, particularly puzzles. An Isle of Lewis chess set sits on a table and customers are invited to sit and play. She hosts a wide variety of events from the usual author readings and talks to trivia nights and meditative experiences, called sound baths, where participants are bathed in sounds to reduce anxiety.
Perry’s goal is to shine a spotlight on each book, so each sits on shelves and benches with their covers facing forward, not lined up with only the spine for customers to read. That means Illume offers fewer books than a traditional bookstore, but that’s alright with her because she curates each book, based on a strict system she has perfected.
Illume, according to Perry, is an independent, curated bookstore with all the genres that range from current and past bestsellers and backlist titles to those she selects for cultural relevancy and diversity. There are also children’s books, science fiction and mystery novels.
Perry has dedicated a wall of shelves to local authors, which she said is one of her customers’ favorite spots to shop.
She fell in love with and moved to Newburyport from New Jersey, where she had been sports and scout mom, when her daughter was accepted at Phillips Exeter Academy and wanted to live at home. She now lives in a new townhome near the Rte. 1 Rotary, which is convenient to the shop where she can be found seven days a week.
Asked what she has learned since opening the store, Perry said, “Everything.” Her previous work experience had been selling for Coca Cola and for a pharmaceutical company, marketing to doctors. But when her children were almost grown, she got the entrepreneur’s itch and decided to open a shop that sold books.
As a young mother, she had fallen in love with books when she joined a neighborhood book club. There she made friends and created bonds with other readers. With her own bookstore, she was replicate that experience, but was not satisfied to open just one club.
Between September and May, Illume hosted nine separate book clubs, and she is planning to add five more this year.
“I love book clubs,” she said. “People get excited.”
The various book clubs are listed on her web site, illumebooks.com. Each club has a facilitator, handpicked by Perry. She also vets each member to make sure they are in a book club that they will enjoy.
The clubs cover the waterfront and include murder mysteries to deeply serious books in a club facilitated by a retired professor of humanities and urban culture studies.
Brine Restaurant has joined in the fun, asking Perry to help it create its own book club, which has hosted two meetings.
Illume has a web site, and Perry does respond to emails, but she has no phone number. She said she did not want to spend her days on the phone answering questions about whether the store carried a certain book. “I want them to come in and meet me,” she said.
The result is that the store has become a community hub. People drop in for what she says are “some of the most interesting conversations.” A neighbor, who lives above the store, spends much of her day working on her computer in a soft chair in the center of the store. Asked if she was able to get her work done, she admitted that she is interrupted a lot by the conversations that swirl around her
Perry enjoys walking customers around the store, which is lightly scented with music playing softly in the background. On the walls are paintings by resident artist Katie Swatland as part of her ‘Summer’s Luminance’ display.
Asked about competing with the popular and well-established Jabberwocky Book Store in the Tannery, Perry said she finds the North Shore and particularly Newburyport to be filled with readers. “Newburyport could have many book stores and all of them would do well.”
