Madison will gain its first self-service bookstore kiosk when The Book Deal at Garver Feed Mill opens on Oct. 16 at 4 p.m.

It’s easy to imagine someone heading to Garver for some Ledger Coffee, a slice of Ian’s pizza, or some ice cream and picking out a book to relax with. Or someone arriving early for a yoga class finding a title to while away the extra time.

And that’s exactly the kind of scenario that The Book Deal co-owner Rick Jacobs envisions for the new store. “We like the idea of someone who might come to Garver for a slice of pizza or a drink and then wanders over to our shelves and leaves with a book they didn't even know they were looking for,” says Jacobs.

Jacobs and his partners, brother Jimbo and friend Josh Derr, operate The Book Deal’s mothership location at 3822 Mineral Point Road. It’s in a growing cluster of small businesses including Grandad’s Farm Stop and Barrett’s Bagels, across from the venerable Village Bar. That location opened in 2023, after the business moved from its first home in an obscure office building off the Beltline. That location opened in 2018.

Jacobs says he’d been looking for a space to open a used bookstore on the east side, in part due to requests from customers, but also due to the bookstore’s longtime mission of “spreading literacy and making books accessible.” Then Garver general manager Bryant Moroder contacted the bookstore about the idea of having a mini store inside the feed mill. The self-service kiosk idea also came from Moroder.

“It was new to us,” says Jacobs, but GROW Greenhouse, the business that sells plants throughout Garver, operates that way: scan a QR code, pay electronically, and you are on your way. The automation was logistically necessary to have the bookstore kiosk open any time that Garver was; staffing it consistently would be financially unrealistic.

The Book Deal worked with a Milwaukee company that helps with payment systems for food trucks to customize a system that works better for books than out-of-the box Square software. “Having the self checkout be easy makes sense,” says Jacobs. But ultimately, payment is by the honor system. “We know there's some risk with it but the whole idea is built around trusting people and we think that the overwhelming majority will respect the space and pay for what they take.” Jacobs jokes there’s a saying that “Readers don't steal and thieves don't read.”

“For the most part people want to support us and allow us to continue to be there.”

The kiosk will be staffed for big events like the Dane County Winter Farmers’ Market, which operates Saturday mornings at Garver from January to April. That’s not necessarily to monitor customers but to have someone on hand to help and also recommend books, a special pleasure of bookselling, says Jacobs.

The 2,000-some books that will populate the shelves at The Book Deal at Garver are curated to create “a selection that feels thoughtful, approachable and fun to browse. We're starting with a mix of popular fiction and nonfiction, leaning a little more towards fiction — all the main fiction genres, romance, mystery, thriller, general fiction, literary classics, and for nonfiction, nature, food writing, memoirs,” Jacobs says. There is also YA, children’s books and even board books. They’ll see what sells and adjust accordingly.

Readers might be tempted by Nick Offerman’s travelogue Where the Deer and the Antelope Play, James McBride’s hit novel The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, or Isabel Wilkerson’s trenchant Caste. The shelves run across the Garver space between the Ian’s area and the lounge, between the main north and south entrances.

The Book Deal is also sponsoring literary trivia nights at Garver on the first Thursday of the month; signups topped 100 for the last one. Jacobs also hopes to host author events at Garver.

At the Mineral Point Road location, which houses some 30,000 books, Jacobs has observed “a lot of younger folks coming in at the store and buying two, three, four or five books at a time, and it seems like they're looking for kind of a digital break. They're on their phones or their laptops a lot and they look at a physical book as a way to get a break from all of that screen time.” He and his co-owners hope that the Garver kiosk will be another way to get books into the hands of readers.

The Mineral Point Road store features a children’s book giveaway program and people who sponsor a Little Free Library are welcome to take, gratis, surplus books that The Book Deal has set aside for that purpose to repopulate their stock. Those programs will not operate out of Garver.

The ribbon cutting will be at 4 p.m. on Oct. 16, and Jacobs has invested in a comically large pair of scissors for the celebratory snip. The bookstore will, from then on out, be open when Garver is open — as long as the electricity is on.