Lost Bookstores of Cincinnati

A soon-to-be shuttered bookstore is a sad place.

On lunch this week, I visited The Booksellers on Fountain Square for the last time, picking up some clearance kids’ books for my son. In October, owner Neil J Van Uum announced the store’s impending closure, and they’ll be closed for good any day now. I’ll miss their amazing staff and the space. Bookstores and libraries are cousins, and the loss of bricks and mortar booksellers diminishes us all. Bookstores and libraries share lovers, after all. They’re both tranquil places that feed our inner lives.

The closing of Booksellers’ on Fountain Square is another thread loosened from the tapestry of Queen City literary history. We’re blessed to still have Ohio Books (stay tuned for a Mercantile Members-only tour of its bindery). But so many others have gone the way of the Dodo. Remember when there was a Brentano’s in Tower Place, when Tower Place was still a mall? Did you ever spend a rainy Saturday on any of the five tatterdemalion floors of Mr. Brengleman’ magical weekend-only bookstore on McMicken? But there were so many more. So many books from the stacks of The Mercantile Library carry a mark from a long-gone bookseller or bindery, where Mercantile Library members bought some of the tomes that ended up in our collection.

Bookstores often overlapped with printers, book-binders, type-founders, and paper-makers. The earliest bookstore in Cincinnati, according to W.H. Venable’s Beginnings of Literary Culture in the Ohio Valley was run by the writer, printer, and Cincinnati booster John Parsons Foote, whose bust currently hides in the Library’s stacks. In 1827, E.H. Flint, son of Rev. Timothy Flint, opened a shop at the corner of Fifth and Walnut, said to be a “favorite loafing place for bibliophiles and musicians.” By the mid-1800s, the Robert A. Clarke Company was one of many stores keeping Cincinnatians supplied with readable pages. It was bought by the Stewart Kidd Co., which later took the name of partner John G. Kidd, who met his end in a steamboat explosion on the Great Lakes. Many Mercantile books carry the John G. Kidd Company’s griffin. Bookstores and bohemianism go hand-in-hand. Check out Greg Hand’s Cincinnati Curiosity post about a couple of beatnik bookstores, including the ’60s-era rendition of Kidd’s.

As recently as 1988, the James Bookstore on Main was said to be the oldest bookstore west of the Alleghenies, going all the way back to the Pearl Street-based bookselling, printing, and type-founding concern of Joseph and Uriah Pierson James, who came across the Alleghenies in 1832 by stage-coach and canal boat. Uriah is credited with publishing many of the earliest authors of the American West, trusted almanacs, and guides to the Ohio and Mississippi rivers that no riverboat pilot left home without. The James’ River Guide, for example, is one that the young Mark Twain, working as a typesetter at Wrightson and Co’s Steam Steam Printing House, directly across Walnut Street from the Mercantile, is said to have memorized, writes Dale Brown in Literary Cincinnati: The Missing Chapter. The firm printed some 2,000 copies of the James’ River Guide. Early members of the Young Men’s Mercantile Library Association would have bought books from James Bookstore on Pearl, and at its later Main Street location, both just blocks from the Library. And the Association bought books library-bound from local suppliers. Many of our First Catalog works carry plates from Wagner Brothers on Race. Our rarest works were covered by R.P. Winkler’s on Main.

So next time you’re wandering the glass floors of the stacks, consider this. Sure, you could peruse many of these volumes on Google Books. Your hands wouldn’t get as dirty. But take a closer look at those bindings. They’re holding together more than pages.

And while the Mercantile Library is always happy to keep books free, don’t forget to support your local bookstore.

-Cedric Rose