Mac’s Backs Books opens in its new home on Friday, November 6, 2026, ending a 33-year run at 1820 Coventry Road in Cleveland Heights and beginning a new chapter directly across the street at 1807 Coventry Road, according to Cleveland Magazine. The magazine reported the move on November 5 and updated its story on November 6 to confirm the opening day, keeping one of Coventry Village’s best-known independent bookstores in the neighborhood it has called home for decades.
The move is the store’s fourth through Coventry Village since it opened in 1982, Cleveland Magazine reported. Rather than leaving for a larger space elsewhere, owner Suzanne DeGaetano chose a building a short walk from the old front door when it became available in 2025 — a decision she framed, in comments to Cleveland Magazine, as a bet on the store’s next half-century.
“We’re going to be celebrating our 50th anniversary in a few years,” DeGaetano told Cleveland Magazine. “We decided that it’s our best chance of being a successful store, you know, 50 more years from now.” That long view shaped the whole relocation: the new storefront is meant to give Mac’s Backs room to grow its stock, gather more people for events, and welcome readers who could not fully use the old three-level layout.
Anyone who visited the former store remembers a particular kind of abundance. Cleveland Magazine described it as a sea of stories, with boxes and stacks of books on the floor to navigate like a maze, shelves of titles from local and national authors, a balcony upstairs with still more books, and a basement meeting room that held book clubs and readings for about 25 people. It was beloved, but it was also tight, and its charms came with real limits.
Accessibility sits at the center of the move. “I love the intimate feel of it, but it’s not handicap-accessible or ADA compliant,” DeGaetano told Cleveland Magazine of the old store. “We just felt we needed a bigger space on one floor.” A single floor removes the stairs that separated browsers from the balcony and basement, and a reader arriving for a signing can reach the whole store.
The extra room is not only about shelving. DeGaetano told Cleveland Magazine the move was driven primarily by a desire to create more gathering space and to expand the stock of genres such as children’s books and poetry collections. “We want a new generation of booksellers to be able to thrive,” she told Cleveland Magazine. “We think that this move gave us the best opportunity for that. We’ll double our event space and be able to offer more to the community.”
The timeline behind Friday’s opening stretches back more than four decades. Mac’s Backs arrived in Coventry in the early 1980s and, according to Cleveland Historical, moved to 1820 Coventry Road in 1993, next door to Tommy’s, another long-standing Coventry business. That address then held the store for 33 years, through the rise of online bookselling and the pressures that closed many independent bookstores, while Mac’s Backs kept hosting readings, signings and book clubs in its basement room.
That history is part of why the old location will be missed. Cleveland Magazine noted that the former store was adjoined to Tommy’s, the classic Coventry restaurant that shared much of its clientele with the bookstore, and that regulars could drift between the two spaces. DeGaetano told Cleveland Magazine she empathizes with customers who will miss that seamless feel, while reassuring them the store’s neighborly ties will not be lost in a move measured in steps rather than miles.
What is changing, then, is the container — not the neighborhood, and not, its owner insists, the culture that built the store. “There’s a true sidewalk culture here,” DeGaetano told Cleveland Magazine, “where people meet and greet each other on the street and feel comfortable. It has all the ingredients of a welcoming neighborhood. That’s what attracted us here, and that’s what keeps us here. I want to be part of this neighborhood and see it succeed.”
For Coventry Village and Cleveland Heights, the significance is straightforward: a destination bookstore that might easily have used a move as an exit instead used it as a reinvestment. A larger, accessible, single-floor store with double the event space gives book clubs, poets and parents shopping the children’s shelves a reason to keep treating Coventry Road as a place to linger, and it gives neighboring shops the foot traffic a working bookstore reliably brings.
What happens next begins on Friday, November 6, when Mac’s Backs opens in the new space at 1807 Coventry Road, according to the update reported by Cleveland Magazine. Readers who knew the old store can expect the same neighborhood and the same name over the door, with a layout built around one floor, broader children’s and poetry sections, and room for roughly twice as many people at the readings and gatherings that have long been part of the store’s life.
DeGaetano’s stated test for the move, in her comments to Cleveland Magazine, was whether it would let a new generation of booksellers thrive and set the store up for decades more on Coventry. Friday’s opening is the first answer — and for a bookstore that has already moved three times without leaving the village, staying put, in every way that matters, may be the most telling part of the story.