For nearly a dozen years, Joe Judd was a fixture in Wicker Park. A wiry guy with a baseball cap practically glued to his head, he could often be found planting flowers around the neighborhood or hosting late-night chess tournaments at Myopic, the used-book store he opened in 1991. But that all changed one morning about five years ago, when Judd woke up to find that his left leg no longer fit in his pants.
Over the next year Judd underwent nine surgeries that left a pair of large indentations (he calls them “handles”) in his leg. “They took huge burns that I have pictures of because I didn’t think anybody would ever believe it,” he says.
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He saved up a few thousand dollars and started tacking up books wanted flyers around Wicker Park, where he lived. He headed out in his pickup some mornings at 7 AM to spend the entire day hitting garage sales and making house calls to check out people’s collections. “I didn’t know anything about running a bookstore—or books, except for the things I read,” he says. He had one rule: only buy books you’d want to read yourself. “You might not want to buy a book—or need a book—about building a house, or you might not read too much lesbian fiction, but if you were going to, would that be the book you’d want?” he says. “If it’s a topic you don’t know anything about, you ask the person who brought the book in, ‘What kind of stuff is this?’”
Within six months, he’d amassed 5,000 volumes. “I couldn’t sit in my living room anymore,” he says. Right around that time a small record shop and cafe called Earwax popped up in the neighborhood. “The day they opened, I walked in,” Judd says. “They had problems with their landlord right away. I was looking for a bookstore and I was hesitant about how much money I could spend and whether I could do it. It seemed like a good idea to have a record store and bookstore together, maybe serve some coffee.” Early in the summer of 1991, Judd and Earwax owner Nick Murray moved into a shared space at 1564 N. Milwaukee. Looking for a name that would relate to the eyes the way Earwax did to the ears, Judd decided to call his new business Myopic.
Eventually Judd befriended five little kids who were living upstairs. One day he told them that sunflowers would grow if they planted seeds in the dirt by the sidewalk. They didn’t believe him. “So I dug up the thing,” he says. “They just did not think that this would ever work. But they watched everything—it’s only a couple days and the stuff comes up. And they were so into it. They helped me build this tiny one-foot-tall fence around it, they helped me water it—they were fascinated by this thing. And eventually the sunflowers grew to about ten feet tall.”
He left Myopic in the hands of his second in command, Adrienne Eaton. And as time passed, he thought long and hard about what he’d do if he recovered. “I was in the hospital when I turned 40,” he says. “I didn’t have that 40-year-old-guy freak-out. I was already freaking out.”
Back in Chicago, few people knew Judd had been released from the hospital, let alone that he was on a farm in the Ozarks. Behan says the staff didn’t say much to customers about his absence.
