A Bookstore, a Bar & Maybe a Banjo on Tunes Day
When Uriah Donnelly and Janet Moscarello enrolled at Rhode Island College in the early 2000s to earn Bachelor of Arts degrees in English, they had no particular end goal in mind. They just knew they enjoyed books. Nearly 25 years later, the couple have turned that love into a business.
Arc{hive} Book + Snackery, located at 4 Market Street in Warren, Rhode Island, is a bar and a bookstore of rare and used books owned by this husband-and-wife team.
After earning her B.A. in English in 2006, Moscarello became a professional portrait photographer, a field she fell in love with at RIC after taking a 101 photography class; while Donnelly earned his B.A. in English in 2002 only to return to earn his M.A. in media studies in 2007. From 2007-2015 he taught film studies at the college.
Both share a love of storytelling through moving images (film) or still images (photography), but opening their joint business brought them back to their roots – books.
“It was Uriah’s dream,” says Moscarello. “He’s always wanted to own a used bookstore.”
“I love the mystery you feel as soon as you walk into a bookstore,” he says. “There’s that smell of nostalgia, and you have to really seek and find things because of the way bookstores are put together. You may never find what you came in looking for, but you’ll probably find something really great.”
But what’s really unique about Arc{hive} is that it doubles as a bar.
It was added for practical reasons, Donnelly says. He knew book sales alone wouldn’t pay the bills. So, adding a bar limited the financial risk. Back in the day, Donnelly used to tend bar. He met Moscarello while bartending at Tortilla Flats on the East Side. Ten years later they married.
Arc{hive} officially opened its doors in 2022, at the tail end of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was also the tail end of an era when bookstores and public libraries had become more rare and endangered than the rare books they housed.
Between 1998 and 2019, more than 6,000 bookstores shut their doors in the United States. But in 2020 the needle started moving in the opposite direction. Independent bookstores began making a comeback.
2022 was a very good year for Arc{hive}. Customers headed to the bookstore in healthy numbers and the percentage of books sold was higher than anticipated.
“We’ve been really surprised every year at how successful our book sales are,” says Moscarello. “Of course, it’s still not enough to pay the rent and our employees, but it has consistently done better than we projected.”
Then again Arc{hive} is more than a place to read a book over a drink. Rhode Island Monthly described it as an experience: “Arc{hive} has food, but it’s not a restaurant. It has alcohol, but it’s not quite a bar. The labels aren’t the important part, it’s the experience that matters.”
Arc{hive} has a welcoming, comfortable environment where people both inside and outside of the close-knit community can come together. It also has monthly entertainment: there’s Tunes Day, an evening of live folk music; The Clam, an evening of storytelling by anyone who cares to stand up and spin a yarn; and Rainbow Tea, an evening of mocktails and movies to celebrate the LGBTQ+ community.
“And Arc{hive} has become the ‘third space’ for people,” says Donnelly. “It’s a place that isn’t work or home but a third space where you can feel at home. Our customers tell us that we’ve filled that third space for them.”
When asked if Arc{hive} is everything he dreamed of, Donnelly admits, “It’s a lot of hard work. I have to remind myself that this is what I wanted. But I do absolutely love it. Right now, it’s tough because I have like 700 books in a pile in my office. We were donated several dozen boxes of books. But I’d rather be drowning in books than anything else.”
“What I love most is the community that it’s built,” says Moscarello, “and the third space it’s given people. It feels like an extension of our home. I guess you could say it’s become a third space for us, as well.”
Photos Property of Lisa Frechette Photography.