The literary event of last fall in Chicago was not a reading or a book signing or an awards ceremony but the wedding of two beloved booksellers. In attendance: a slew of notable authors, the editors of independent presses, publicists, other bookstore owners. Literary thriller writer Gillian Flynn performed the ceremony. “If an apocalypse happened out there,” someone said to me that night, “we could reconstruct the entire American literary world just from this party.”

When the venue, the Exchange on Michigan Avenue, closed for the night, much of the group trooped a block south to the second floor of the Fine Arts Building and karaoked till dawn at Exile in Bookville, owned by the newlyweds, Javier Ramirez and Kristin Gilbert Ramirez. Maybe you’ve only walked past and noticed the folded sign on the sidewalk advertising the shop or one of its author events. Maybe you’ve gone in and lost hours in the three small rooms, poring over the carefully curated selection or gawking out the window at the views of Grant Park and Buckingham Fountain. If you did, you probably left with five books you hadn’t known you desperately wanted and with two new friends in the owners. As Florida-based author Nathan Hill puts it, “A typical night out with Javier and Kristin involves unexpectedly running into someone they know — a waiter, busboy, bartender, a random bookstore customer — who will inevitably send over a round of drinks or snacks because Javier and Kristin seem to be friends with freaking everyone.”

Their paths to bookselling, and to each other, are worthy of a twisty novel with a well-earned meet-cute and a happy ending. Shortly after high school, Javier, who grew up in Sacramento, California, began working at a Tower Records there, selling videos. This was 1988 (“The year I was born!” Kristin pipes in as Javier tells the story). Five years later, he was moved to the books section. He’d been what he calls a “surface reader” prior to that, and learned about books on the job. Two years later, Tower was opening a store in Schaumburg and asked him to come out to help start its books department.

He stayed in the Chicago area to work at Crown Books for “a long, hard year,” then found himself at his first indie: the Sears Tower branch of Barbara’s Bookstore. This was a world where booksellers could get to know customers, where people wanted recommendations, where employees could influence which books were stocked. When he left Barbara’s, it was for another indie, then another. One of these, the Book Stall in Winnetka, is where I met him in 2012. I left with an armful of novels he’d suggested and an invitation to join Publishing Cocktails, a social gathering he hosts with writer Keir Graff. Javier is a natural networker and connector within the national bookseller scene, which might have something to do with how he’s ended up judging the National Book Award for fiction and the Carnegie Medal for both fiction and nonfiction.

The more I got to know Javier, the more I was convinced he needed his own bookstore. I daydreamed as much with other writers. He had so much accumulated goodwill among Chicago authors, we figured, that it would have to succeed. He’d helped many of our careers immeasurably. He’d pushed our first novels when few people had discovered them. He’d hauled books across town off the clock so we could sign them. A few years ago, that dream briefly came true when Ramirez and a partner opened Madison Street Books in the West Loop. The opening party was on March 14, 2020. “We were basically open one day,” he says, and then the store had to switch to online orders.

Enter Kristin Gilbert. Raised in Reno, Nevada, she came to Illinois for college and stayed for two master’s and a PhD — the latter in criminology and law, focusing on language and gestures in legal settings. She lived just blocks from Madison Street Books, and even before the store officially opened, she called to ask if they carried the novel My Dark Vanessa. Javier answered, and informed her they didn’t. She told him it was OK, that she’d get it from another local indie. “And then I thought about it for a minute,” she says, “and that’s such an asshole move.” She called back, apologized, and asked him to order it. When she dropped by a few days later to pick it up, he invited her to that opening party.

The event was on her birthday, and she had no intention of going. But then her mother canceled her trip to town, so Kristin went, solo. When Javier emailed the next day to thank her for coming, she mentioned that her mom always got her a signed first edition for her birthday. They got to messaging about books, including the Swedish vampire novel Let the Right One In — a prophetic title for their budding friendship.

Things weren’t working out in Kristin’s relationship or between Javier and his business partner. Before the end of that summer, Javier and Kristin had each severed ties with the past and had launched two endeavors together: an online iteration of Exile in Bookville and a romance. About that name: Many will recognize the homage to Liz Phair’s 1993 debut album, Exile in Guyville, the couple’s nod to the idea that their store would always include a selection of music. (Phair, a Chicago-area native, has yet to visit the shop but often likes its posts on social media.)

For a little under a year, the enterprise existed only virtually — hosting well-attended author events on Zoom, quietly growing its reputation — while the couple searched for a physical location. Javier was visiting the Dial, a bookstore on the second floor of the Fine Arts Building, when someone behind the desk asked, “Are you Javier? Do you happen to be looking for a bookstore?” The Dial was closing, and the space could be his if he and Kristin bought every single thing inside, from the printer and plants to an inventory of new and used books that wasn’t what they would have chosen. There were a lot of reasons not to do it: Kristin was teaching full-time at Elmhurst University. They’d have to use so much of their savings on the required upfront rent that they’d have little money to buy new books. And it was April 2021 — the Loop was practically deserted. “We thought about it for a second,” Javier says. And then they took the plunge.

There was no grand opening this time, no publicity, no GoFundMe, no employees, just heaps of accrued trust and friendship from nearly every author in Chicago and a lot of book buyers. And it worked. “I’m a pessimist,” Javier says, “so I was surprised in the first two years what we were doing in sales.”

Exile’s first in-person event (outdoors, in the building’s rooftop garden) was that July, for T.J. Newman’s debut novel, Falling. Between the new store owners and the new author, there was, Newman recalls, “this alchemy of nerves and excitement that made it feel like big, difficult dreams — writing books and selling books — were possible.” Newman has returned for both of her subsequent books. Three titles into a career of bestsellers, the Phoenix-based author still insists that her publisher send her to Chicago to launch each one at Exile.

The couple take advantage of a variety of spaces in the Fine Arts Building, including the Studebaker Theater, for events. Percival Everett has made a visit. So has Jonathan Franzen, who arrived early for his reading and sat in the back office for six hours, writing. Ling Ma offered to run the store while the couple were on their honeymoon. (They were grateful, but declined.) Flynn, who has an office in the building, stops in at the end of just about every workday. “When I first moved to Chicago 15 years ago, it was Javier who introduced me to the literary scene,” she says.

Customers are often taken aback by all the signed copies on the shelves. (“How do you know so many authors?”) They also ask where the eclectic selection — books in translation, small-press printings, unusual finds — comes from. The answer, Javier says, is that when you finally have your own store, you “just do all the weird shit you always wanted to do when you worked for someone.”

Everyone at the wedding had their own story: the time the launch party went till 1 a.m., the time the store sold more copies of some small-press novella than any store in the country, the time Exile shared 20 extra copies of hot commodity Crying in H Mart with a rival indie.

As soon as the couple asked her to officiate, Flynn knew exactly how she’d start: with Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “Book Power.” It begins: “Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower.” “It felt perfect,” Flynn says, “for two people who live and breathe books.”