Copper Dog Books in Beverly, Mass., is expanding. Co-owners Meg Wasmer and Julie Karaganis will be taking over an adjacent storefront, increasing the store's size from 1,000 sq. ft. to just about 1,800. The store will be under construction for a month, and given that the two storefronts used to be one space, Karaganis and Wasmer are hoping for an "easy wall removal."
Wasmer and Karaganis, who bought the store, formerly known as Cabot Street Books & Cards, last August, have been dreaming of this possibility for a while. Prior to the pandemic, they imagined using the extra room to create a high-quality event space and wanted to add more education seminars to the store's programming. Now, they're looking forward to being able safely to accommodate social-distancing guidelines and meet more than the bare minimum of ADA requirements. They'll also be expanding the store's sidelines offerings.
While they've wanted to do this for years, they realized last November that their store could not be "the store we knew we wanted" without an expansion. In February, Copper Dog's previous neighbors started talking about moving their business, and Karaganis and Wasmer began crunching the numbers. The pandemic has made the expansion a bit of a scary prospect, they said, but their community has been very supportive, so they decided to go ahead with it.
Nubble Books in Biddeford, Maine, which is in the process of closing, is the source for most of the fixtures that Copper Dog will be adding, while An Unlikely Story in Plainville, Mass., is providing an old cash-wrap fixture.