At the end of the 2020 National Football League season, Chicago Bears offensive lineman James Daniels and his wife Erin were looking for an offseason home base, and somewhere to put down roots after football. He was entering the final year of his rookie contract, and there was no telling where he’d be playing over the next few years. She had one year left of graduate school in occupational therapy at Washington University in St. Louis. They’re both Midwest natives (they met as students at the University of Iowa), and didn’t want to stray too far from home. They spent each of several long weekends visiting and looking at real estate in what Daniels called “a random city.”
And when it came time to make a decision, naturally, they chose Sun Prairie, Wisconsin.
After they built a house on the north side of town, Erin worked in occupational therapy while James went from the Bears to the Pittsburgh Steelers, where he played from 2022 through the early part of the 2024 season, which ended abruptly thanks to a torn Achilles tendon.
Erin was feeling a bit of dissatisfaction with the way the OT field was evolving, and also feeling a bit of entrepreneurial energy. And James had nothing but time – Achilles rehab only takes up a couple hours a day.
“I was like, ‘You know what? I’m home all day, 19 hours a day. I can actually do some research and try to put together a business plan,” James Daniels said in an interview at the store they opened last fall – Prairie Pages at 113 West Main Street in Sun Prairie.
The Daniels looked at a couple spots in downtown Sun Prairie and spoke with a few folks in the local business community, and negotiated a lower rent than they were first quoted at the new Monarch on Main building. They gave all their contractors a deadline: they were opening November 1, 2025. James had signed with the Miami Dolphins for the 2025 season and would be off that weekend thanks to a Thursday game that week; however, a pectoral tear on the fourth play of the first game made him even more available to tend to the new business.
“We want to make a difference”
James Daniels said Erin comes from a family of readers, but he didn’t.
“If the first time you ate steak it’s bad, or the first time you ate sushi, you’re never gonna eat steak or sushi again. I just feel like, with how we grew up in the education system, that’s what happened,” he said. “I read The Handmaid’s Tale in college, and I hated it. But then I came back and read it last year. I was like, ‘Wow, that’s a lot better book.'”
That is a message Daniels wants to get to the community, especially men.
“I really want to get men reading,” he said. “Probably 85, 90 percent of our customers are women. And when you get men reading, it helps them with empathy.”
He hosted a book club on the SA Cosby novel Razorblade Tears, and said about half the attendees were men.
And that’s the kind of thing Daniels wants Prairie Pages to accomplish – knowing there are bigger bookstores, not to mention Amazon, that can sell more books at lower prices.
But Daniels said there’s something about a local bookstore owner recommending a book that the algorithm’s going to miss.
“We have books in here that have 50 reviews on Amazon, and people have come back and said, ‘Wow, that book is amazing.’ Shopping online, you’d never pick something with 50 reviews because you have a book with 500,000 reviews — you’re going with the book that’s 500,000,” Daniels said.
He’s also aware that competition comes from digital books, as well as other forms of entertainment and other places to put attention. But books are a good value, he said – not to mention permanent.
“A novel takes eight to 10 hours to read, and it can be $14.99, $18.99, $32.99. But you go to a movie theater, you don’t even have to get any drinks or anything, the tickets are going to be $16, and that’s for an hour 45 plus 15 minutes of previews,” he said. “If I buy this book right here, this book’s already been printed. No matter what, you can’t change how that book is written. But you see with TV shows, movies, and even stuff on Kindle, they can edit the stuff after. When you have something permanent like a book, you can’t take away anything from it.”
And it’s not just about selling books, either – Daniels wants Prairie Pages to become a gathering place for book lovers, or anyone else.
“There’s not really a lot of third spaces outside of Madison. So it’s nice, people can come here on a Tuesday night and talk to friends, chill out for an hour and a half,” he said.
He added that the community of Sun Prairie has embraced the couple and the shop, with other downtown business owners stopping by to shop.
In the end, though, he knows a local indie bookstore isn’t going to be the most lucrative investment, and that’s okay.
“Our goal is not to make as much money as possible. We want to make a difference,” he said. “The return on investment, the amount of money that we pay in rent that we chose to build out and all that stuff, that could go on the stock market and make way, way more. We’re not in it for money. We’re trying to make a difference in the community in Sun Prairie.”
