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Alice Bentley
Stars' Owner

ALL ABOUT ALICE & THE STARS OUR DESTINATION

(Plus Alice's favorite books: The List)

Alice Bentley was born and raised in Chicago, finishing her BS in Physics at the University of Illinois in Urbana in 1981. She has worked as a lab tech, a design engineer, has built prototype optical test bed equipment and worked for 4 years in the Main Control Room at Fermilab. She has been attending and assisting at SF conventions since 1975. In 1983 she married high school friend and fellow fan Michael Brian Bentley. Together, they and their son Marty (born a suspicious 9 months after Minicon '92) still get to conventions between 4 and 10 times a year.

In 1988 she partnered with DreamHaven Books owner Greg Ketter to start a new science fiction specialty store in Chicago on Clark St. just south of Wellington. At that time the neighborhood was a chaotic mix of cool little shops, working class homes and over 30 bookstores. Four years later, as success produced overcrowding, the store moved to Belmont just west of Sheffield, where it rambled through 3,000 sq ft. The larger space allowed for more and grander events, a proliferation of subcategories and products, and the scope for overweening ambition to run rampant.

In 1994 Alice, with the help of some financing (thanks Mom!), bought Greg out, though they remain the best of friends. This left her free to try more risky adventures, which is fortunate because with the explosions of the chain bookstores and the rapidly growing deployment of the internet, surviving as a specialty bookstore had become a lot more challenging. It was time to become either much smaller or much larger, so in the summer of1997 she purchased the 25 year old mail order service WEINBERG BOOKS from Robert Weinberg, who wished to devote more of his time to writing.

Adding a catalog and mail order business more than doubled the sales volume and close to tripled the staff requirements. It also drastically increased the number of small presses the store carried, because Bob, owner of the Weird Tales license and long time Lovecraft afficianado, had established a truly impressive subcategory of pulp reprints and lovecraftian material. As the years passed, the neighborhood became gentrefied, the publishing industry changed almost beyond recognition, business became even more of a struggle and almost all the other bookstores closed.

By the spring of 2000 it became clear that larger changes were needed if the store was to survive. The store scaled back on its long held commitment to stocking everything in print, focusing more on new releases, staff favorites and specialty presses, while increasing the ability to special order titles. In September 2000, the store moved to its current location in Evanston, where there is cheap, available parking, excellent CTA and Metra access, and a neighborhood full of really wonderful and unique shops as well as a vision of keeping it that way.

- Alice

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