The town of Plainville, Massachusetts, is about to get a lot busier.
Jeff Kinney, the author of the “Diary of Wimpy Kid” book series, and his wife Julie Kinney opened a bookstore called An Unlikely Story there in 2015. Now they have plans to expand several parcels of land in the town to create a beer garden, a restaurant and a function space.
Jim Smith lives in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, and uses a walker. But he makes it a point to get someone to bring him to An Unlikely Story at least twice a year.
“I love this bookstore,” Smith said. “Once you find it, you’re going to come back. Nobody comes here once.”
An Unlikely Story’s logo is an elephant holding a book, a nod to the building that occupied its plot of land bacj in the 1800s. Jeff Kinney said a stuffed circus prize elephant sat in the window.
“I thought, ‘That’s a great logo for us. That’s a great mascot because an elephant never forgets,” Jeff Kinney said. “And one of the things that we try to do is preserve the history of Plainville in the new space.”
Blue and gold color the interior of the bookstore, paying homage to Jeff Kinney’s father — a former U.S. Naval Academy student — who fostered the author’s early love for reading. The store houses reproductions and photographs of signs that used to be on the original building, including the general store, the Plainville pharmacy, and the Plainville public market.
Julie Kinney said the plan for the store was born from a desire to create a space that people of all ages could enjoy.
“One day, Jeff came to me, and he said, ‘I know what it should be. It should be a bookstore.’ Because anyone from age less than 1 to 91 and beyond can enjoy a bookstore,” Julie Kinney said. “That was our business plan, which lacks a business plan. But we knew we wanted to provide the community with something and create something beautiful.”
That mission hit home for Dan Sullivan, a regular patron of the store.
“[It] provides a sense of community, a warmth that goes beyond just the beauty of the building and the structure itself,” Sullivan said. “It puts you in a different mindset than almost any place else… It’s a place that I return to again and again, simply because of the way that it makes me feel.”
And Sullivan said he looks forward to the Kinney’s plans of expanding their reach in Plainville even further.
“What Jeff and Julie have done to the community is really enhance a sense of worth, buoyed the entire area,” Sullivan said. “The fact that they want to reinvest into their home and the community is appreciated by everyone I speak to.”
On the third floor of the building is a huge open space with couches and a widescreen TV for meetings, and a glass-enclosed bubble that looks like a wacky take on NASA’s ground control. It’s part of Jeff Kinney’s studio, or what he calls “the center of the ‘Wimpy Kid’ universe.” Balloons of the titular ‘Wimpy Kid,’ Greg Heffley, hang from the ceiling. They’re replicas of balloons that flew in paste Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parades.
The office window looks down on the construction site for the beer garden that the Kinneys are building. Jeff Kinney says the space is intended to be family-friendly, with both a kitchen and a bar as well as a stage for performances.
“I think what we’ve really learned from this bookstore is that people, especially after COVID, are craving these third spaces, something outside of work and church, a neutral place to gather as a community,” Jeff Kinney said. “We get really excited about the connections that happen in a place like this, especially during a really polarized political time.”
Julie Kinney adds, “We just started thinking, you know, to really draw people, you need more than just one thing in a place, right? So we started working with others who helped us identify the kinds of things that would draw people, that would make a place a destination.”
Touring the beer garden site, Jeff Kinney said the plan came together when Hillary Clinton was scheduled to visit An Unlikely Story right before COVID-19 broke out.
“I remember feeling like, ‘Wow, if we could get Hillary Clinton to come to our bookstore, then we really can get anyone,’ Jeff Kinney said. “That’s when we started to look out across the square and say, ‘You know what? In order for us to grow, we really need for the downtown to grow up around us.’ So that was really the spark.”
And because he “Wimpy Kid” books have been so successful, with more than 300 million copies sold worldwide, Jeff Kinney and his wife are trying to put their resources towards healing divides and bringing people together.
“We grew up in a time, even recently, where we didn’t even ask our neighbors about their politics,” Jeff Kinney said, ”and now it’s just so polarized.”
Jeff Kinney and Julie Kinney recently made a connection with some people in their community. At a restaurant, they were seated next to a father and son.
“The son bore a striking resemblance to our son at the same age. So we struck up a conversation with them, and we found out that they’re from Plainville. Also, the kid plays basketball just like my son did,” Jeff Kinney said.”Before you knew it, my son was training this kid. This kid came to my son’s adult league, men’s league, basketball game. My son’s going to go to this kid’s game. [All] because of the proximity that we had in that restaurant. We got to know our neighbors.”
Jeff Kinney thinks those kinds of incidents are going to occur again and again and again in the spaces that he and his wife are creating, starting with the beer garden, which is due to open in the spring of 2026.
And what would Greg Heffley, the perpetually hapless hero of Kinney’s “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” series, think of the beer garden construction?
“I think Greg Heffley would be very bitter to know that some grown-up is capitalizing on his diaries,” Kinney said, laughing, “and spending his money on a beer garden where he can’t even enjoy the product.”
____
Emiko Tamagawa produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Todd Mundt. Tamagawa also adapted it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
Copyright 2026 WBUR