“I firmly believe that everyone is a nerd about something,” laughs Laura Harvey. She’s one of three owners of Adventure Ink, downtown Milan’s hub for books, comics, and games.
Laura and her husband, Jeff Harvey, bought the store in 2018 when it was located behind Collins Center on Main Street in Milan. Jeff, who was in talks with the previous owner about starting a podcast, was eventually approached about buying the store outright.
“I think the previous owner realized that he over extended himself,” said Laura.
Jeff was, admittedly, a bit apprehensive about buying a comic book store in 2018. The closure of stores like Borders seemed only to add more nails to physical media’s coffin.
“I worked at Borders for twelve years,” Laura reveals. “I worked for the Arborland store for a long time, and then I went to the Lohr Road store. I opened that store and then closed that store. That was a formative period of my life. Of course, like every Borders employee, the pipe dream is always to have your own to own your own bookstore. So, in the back of my mind, I was like, ‘this is one step closer to my bookstore!’”
“I refer to buying the store as the biggest impulse buy we’ve ever made,” she laughs. “Jeff was talking about how we might be able to actually make it happen. Theoretically, if we were to buy this, how we could potentially get the loan. He was figuring out how his schedule might work. I listened the whole time, and said ‘yeah, I think maybe we should do it!’”
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The closure of her former employer, and other physical media outlets, didn’t intimidate Laura in the slightest.
“After Borders went under, there was a lot of talk about it being ‘the end of the brick and mortar bookstore,’ blah, blah, blah,” said Laura. “The thing about people who are passionate about books is that we all want to go places where there are books. We want to connect with other people who are passionate about books. We want to touch the books. We want to smell the books. Because, we’re weirdos!” she said. Adding, “Amazon can’t replicate that experience.”
The store aims to be Milan’s hub for book lovers and nerds alike.
“We do all comics, board games, and also new news books of all kinds. We have a good graphic novel section, but we also do well with middle-grade fiction. We have a pretty good horror community. We can order anything,” said Laura. “I focus more on the book side of things, whereas Jeff focuses more on the comic side of things. Then we have another friend—who is our third owner—Matt. He does more with games, like board games and card games. He runs our Friday night Lorcana tournaments.”
Those Lorcana tournaments are just one example of the many different events that Adventure Ink does to bring the community together.
“We have three book clubs,” says Harvey. “We have one called The Collective Shelf book club, where we read books that are sort of relevant to current events and sort of political books. Then we also have a silent Book Club, which is like where people come to connect with other just bookish people. You bring whatever book you’re currently reading. We chat about books for the first hour, and then we sit and read silently, like we’re in elementary school, for the second hour.”
At the end of January, the store will host their second Super Smash Brothers tournament, with a cash prize available to first place winners.
“Our goal was to be that location where people could come and get nerdy about things,” she said.
Check out Adventure Ink’s upcoming events at AdventureInk.xyz or place an order at through their BookShop.org website.
