On the afternoon of October 16, a pair of comically oversized scissors will slice through a ribbon inside Garver Feed Mill, and Madison will get something it has never had before: a bookstore with no bookseller in it.
The Book Deal at Garver Feed Mill is a self-service kiosk — roughly 2,000 books shelved in the open space between the Ian's Pizza counter and the lounge, straddling the building's main north and south entrances. There is no cash register and no clerk on duty. Shoppers scan a QR code, pay electronically, and walk out with their books. The store is open whenever Garver is open, which is to say whenever the lights are on.
It is, by the account of co-owner Rick Jacobs, an experiment built on trust. "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 said. He likes to cite an old bookselling maxim: "Readers don't steal and thieves don't read."
The idea didn't originate with the booksellers. Bryant Moroder, Garver's general manager, approached The Book Deal about putting a mini-store inside the feed mill, and it was Moroder who proposed the self-service model. Jacobs and his partners — his brother Jimbo and their friend Josh Derr — had been hunting for an east-side location anyway, driven partly by customer requests and partly by the store's stated mission of "spreading literacy and making books accessible."
The self-service format was already proven inside Garver's walls. GROW Greenhouse, which sells plants throughout the building, operates on the same scan-and-pay principle. For The Book Deal, automation wasn't just a novelty — it was a financial necessity. Staffing a second location for every hour Garver is open would have been unrealistic, Jacobs said, so the kiosk had to run itself. The store worked with a Milwaukee company that builds payment systems for food trucks to customize software better suited to books than off-the-shelf Square tools.
The kiosk will be staffed for big draws like the Dane County Winter Farmers' Market, which runs Saturday mornings at Garver from January through April. That staffing isn't about policing customers, Jacobs said, but about having someone on hand to help and to recommend books — "a special pleasure of bookselling."
The Garver shelves are curated to feel, in Jacobs' words, "thoughtful, approachable and fun to browse." The mix leans toward fiction — romance, mystery, thriller, general and literary classics — with nonfiction in nature, food writing and memoir, plus young adult, children's titles and board books. Among the titles readers might spot are Nick Offerman's travelogue "Where the Deer and the Antelope Play," James McBride's "The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store," and Isabel Wilkerson's "Caste." The store plans to watch what sells and adjust.
The kiosk is an outpost of a bookstore with a longer history than its shelf count suggests. The Book Deal opened its first location in 2018, then moved in 2023 to 3822 Mineral Point Road, where it sits in a growing cluster of small businesses that includes Grandad's Farm Stop and Barrett's Bagels, across from the venerable Village Bar. That main store holds some 30,000 books, and it runs programs the Garver kiosk won't replicate: a children's book giveaway and a partnership that lets sponsors of Little Free Libraries take surplus books at no charge to restock their boxes.
Jacobs has noticed something at the Mineral Point Road store that informs the Garver bet. "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," he said. "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." The kiosk, he hopes, is one more way to put books in readers' hands.
The setting is a fitting one for a business built on second chances. Garver Feed Mill was constructed in 1906 by the United States Sugar Company as a sugar beet processing plant — the largest factory in Madison at the time, and one the city came to call the "Sugar Castle." It processed beets until 1924, then passed to Garver's Supply Company, which made feed and other products there for decades. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2017, and after a roughly $19.8 million renovation by Baum Revision, it reopened in 2019 as a food-and-wellness hub. Today it houses Ian's Pizza, Ledger Coffee Roasters, Calliope Ice Cream, Roll Play Madison, Glitter Workshop, Kosa Ayurvedic Spa and more — a collection of producers and makers under one historic roof.
That's precisely the ecosystem Jacobs is counting on. "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," he said.
The Book Deal is also planting deeper roots at Garver. It sponsors literary trivia nights on the first Thursday of each month — signups topped 100 for the most recent one — and Jacobs hopes to host author events in the building.
The ribbon cutting is set for 4 p.m. on Oct. 16. The scissors, Jacobs confirmed, are comically large. After the snip, the shelves are open whenever Garver is — no clerk required.