Powner’s Book Shop
No, there is no accident, no riot on the corner of Clark Street, opposite the City Hall. The scrambling mass of people are simply book lovers and book collectors, and Powner’s has got in a new consignment of books. Such scenes occur every Saturday. The big stalls in front of the shop are filled with all sorts of books, old Roman antiquities, books on sports, old poetry, collected by someone who had disposed of his books, or who had left his treasures behind him. Mr. Powner used to be a school teacher in Greensburg, Indiana, and he started his book business about twelve years ago with the thoroughness of a school master. Rare and valuable books are his own special department, and he leaves modern books entirely to his clerks.
His shop today is the center for the Chicago collectors. The human interest he takes in his customers is that of a real antiquarian. Everybody is at home in his shop. He doesn’t begrudge anyone finding a gem on his “quarter counter.” Last week, for instance, some lucky chap found a first edition of Rousseau’s “Emile” with Rousseau’s autograph presentation inscription to the King and the royal coat of arms on the binding, and bought the book for seventy-five cents. “Such things may happen,” was Mr. Powner’s remark when he heard of the transaction. “I am glad he got it.”
Saturday is the great book day. In the back room upon empty book boxes men of all walks of life sit around, prosperous business men, millionaires, who are just enjoying living, students, newspaper men from the nearby newspaper offices, but they all are linked by a common love. They are all ardent book collectors.
There are a good many other book shops in Chicago. There is Hill’s, who caters to the extravagant wishes of Western millionaires. Then there is McClurge’s, the Model Book Store, conducted like a modern department store.
But then there is the unique product of the Chicago book market, the peripatetic book-seller. Half collector, half merchant, these men are constantly nosing about shops, picking up books in Powner’s, for instance, for twenty-five cents and selling them at once for two dollars and a half to Mr. Hill, who they know has an inquiry for that particular copy. They love the uncertainty of their daily bread. Setting out in the morning upon their rounds, they look forward to their finds of the day. In a junk shop they, perhaps, will run across one of those scarce items which are found once in a lifetime, and again they may find nothing but worry about the needs of the day.
1916
Chicago Revisited
In Memoriam Julius Doerner
JULIUS DOERNER is dead. He had been a book dealer after his own heart. Living among his books was his delight. He bought constantly, sold little and read much: a man who valued his books by their contents. He was as simple as a girl of sixteen, a bad girl of sixteen.
He wore an alpaca coat and panama hat winter and summer, in snow and shine. Both were bought ten years ago at a Salvation Army store. Cats were Julius Doerner’s only companions; stray cats picked up on dark nights in alleys and doorways. They were named after the days of the week on which he found them. He never had more than fourteen. “Friday Afternoon” was a black tom-cat with six toes on each paw. It could talk. Doerner said so and he was very truthful. He hated women who were unwomanly, thought policemen incompetent, and lived on seven cents a day.
He loved his mother, who sent him a fried chicken every Christmas, half a turkey on each Thanksgiving day, and who brought him into this world fifty-seven years ago.
He loved her so much that he wanted to give her a gift which no money in the world could purchase—exclusive, unique. So, he bought an old Washington hand press, rusty and prehistoric type, and wrote a book for her; he set it up letter by letter, word by word, line by line, page by page; distributing the type after he had made only one impression. It took him three years to complete his book. It took him another year to illuminate it with rare wood cuts by Durer and Kranach, with miniatures taken from old hand-written cloister books. He bound it with his own hands, and tooled the leather of its covers with exquisite golden arabesques.
His old mother in Pennsylvania could not read a word of English, though born and brought up in America. She used Pennsylvania Dutch exclusively.
Julius Doerner never slept in a bed but was accustomed to sit up all night in a Morris chair in the back of his shop. His most exquisite pleasure, and only recreation was to play Bach, Mozart and Beethoven on an old spinet.
He wore the same celluloid collar for twelve years, and washed it every Monday morning with sapolio. The same cake and collar were purchased from a starving peddler on a very cold night, as an alternative to giving the peddler two bits for a night’s lodging.
Goethe and Franz Lieber were his favorites; Whitman, Poe and Wilde, his vaudeville stage.
He cooked vegetable soup in a big tin kettle each Tuesday, and drank it cold for the rest of the week, until the kettle was empty.
He knew what was great and beautiful in art, letters and life. To him Jesus was the greatest of men, and Rockefeller the meanest. Money was as unreal as people who buy books according to auction catalogues and bindings.
He died in his Morris chair with a book on his knees. There he was found, rigid and cold, several days afterwards by the grocer, who came to dun him for last month’s bill, which amounted to one dollar and eighty-five cents.
Julius Doerner had a big heart, a fine mind, was a Spartan by nature, German in sentimentality, a Yankee in shrewdness, a lover of truth, an enemy of hypocrisy and idleness; a friend of outcasts.
He knew books and men, and therefore could not make a success in selling books to men.
Chicagoans who met him on the street saw his long hair, his alpaca coat and his straw hat, and called him a freak; others who had met him thought him a queer one; the chosen few to whom he gave his friendship, loved him.
He was five feet, eight inches tall, wore locks and a beard that hadn’t been touched by shears for twenty-five years, didn’t give a damn for conventions and appearances, lived his own life, subservient to no one, lording over no one.
The world thought him poor. He was rich.
Requiescat in pace!
Kroch’s International Book Store on Michigan Boulevard is to the West what Brentano’s is to the East. Shopkeepers have become teachers and publicity agents. Their clients don’t know what they wish to purchase. They are too tired or too ignorant to read literary reviews. They let Mr. Kroch tell them what to read.
Mr. Kroch is an interesting little man. He wears a toupee and a broad kindly smile. He has the demeanor of a man who has risen from the ranks and is proud of it. He has kept pace with his success. Money has not turned his head. He knows that he owes gratitude to the authors whom he sells. The quainter his find, the more exclusive seems his taste, the more he pleases his clients, the greater will be his cash receipts. And so he has an open eye for authors who are not popular.
What greater boast for a book salesman in Chicago than to have disposed of more than two hundred copies of Oscar Wilde’s Life and Confessions by Frank Harris? To have induced more than one hundred people to buy each month Pearson’s Magazine? And his clients are the very rich; he doesn’t tire showing them the other side of life.
Frank Morris is still on deck, issuing catalogues, selling rare books, delighting his many friends and clients with the charm of his personality. The man with a literary past is a most amiable companion, presuming that his heart is filled with love, and that his compassion overlooks the faults of men. Frank Morris played an important part, if not a central one, in that lurid period of the early nineties, when Chicago was the literary Mecca of America.
Powner’s Book Store is the gathering place of book hunters and collectors.
“Gems can be found here,” seems the unwritten motto that attracts antiquarians, as a lighted candle attract moths. Young Mr. Powner is in the Service, somewhere-in-France. Mr. Powner, Sr., had to leave once more his ranch in Arizona, and assume the responsibilities of a Chicago shopkeeper.
And then there is Janski, the old assistant of Frank Morris in his late Adams Street shop, established in a store of his own, selling books as ever, happy and contented to contribute his part toward the elevation of Chicago’s literary taste.
On Van Buren Street, near the Boulevard, is also a new and important book store. Mr. Chandler, for more than thirty years of McClurge’s Publishing house, has set up his establishment there. Very few books are in his place, but each is a jewel. He is a sort of a George D. Smith of Chicago, but minus gambling inclinations. Books for him are not objects for speculation, but gilt-edged values.
And, of course, I paid a visit to my friend, George Engelke. He is a great occultist, who has not eaten meat for thirty years. He believes in the powers of Hanish of lamented memory and is a sincere follower of his cult. Engelke is like Alfred Stieglitz of 291 Fifth Avenue, N. Y. His soul seems to walk three steps ahead of his body, or three steps behind his body. His life is an eternally undecided race, between soul and body.
The Radical Book Shop is right around the corner. It is a co-operative store with a large stock of ultra-radical pamphlets and magazines, the meeting place for all sorts of Bolsheviki, pleasant Bolsheviki, who want to intoxicate themselves with words rather than with deeds, who are more eager to have a good time under present conditions than to be martyrs for a new and better world. And when they want to amuse themselves, and be real radicals, they go around the block, to the Dillpickle. Mr. Johns, who is one of the co-operatives of the bookshop, is also one of the proprietors of the Dillpickle, a sort of restaurant, public forum, dance hall, and at present “the slum of Chicago,” because some of its hangers-on were arrested as supposed bomb manufacturers during the recent I. W. W. trial.
It is a sort of debating club, a la Greenwich Village, with automobiles in front of it after ten p. m. when the rich come to see the poor, the law-abiding want to have a peek at the lawless, the properly married to see the free-lovers.... Chicago is very young, you know! It is in its bootees. All these “new ideas” are here in flower of springtime.
I once said, “Were there no Greenwich Village, one would have to be invented.” Chicago invented its own. The Dillpickle will have many competitors soon, under the signs of flowers, vegetables and animals. In a couple of years they will become stale canned goods. And then the empty cans will be consigned to the ash can. Greenwich Village all over again!
1919
In Boston
BOOK stores are the intellectual barometers of our cities. Show me where people buy their books and I will tell you what sort of life they lead. Book stores always were and are mirrors of the habits and intellectual preferences of men and women.
The private library has ceased to be the pride of the home. Homes have given way to apartments and flats with only little space to spare for book shelves. The garage has taken the place of the library. We see our friends in hotels and clubs, we spend our evenings only rarely at home. Our Age of Electricity and rapid transportation facilities does not permit us to acquire the placid habits of book collectors and of book lovers. Sure enough we read books, because we want to know what their authors have to say. But the author remains a stranger to us, the book once read is done with forever. We speak about automobiles, we look forward to owning a machine, we are building garages with the same enthusiasm that our fathers used to expend on their libraries and their books.
New York is different. But New York is not an American city. It’s so near to Europe and its population so distinctly foreign that the change of the last 50 years is hardly noticeable yet in its book shops. Detroit, the old French settlement, which only ten years ago was a tenth of its present size, has no second-hand book shops at all. The Detroit book dealers mete out light summer fiction which fits into people’s lunch baskets in the summer and sentimental Christmas carols in the winter. Technical books, automobile literature are their specialties. This is only natural. Ninety per cent of the people are building motor cars in order to make a living; they are the buyers of the technical books. The minority live in order to buy cars and make motor trips, and therefore they need light fiction.
The character of Albany is most truthfully portrayed in its book stores. Our legislators have so much time on their hands that they actually read historical books, books about Dutch New York, about the Wars of the Revolution, law books, old state records. It is considered good form to collect a historical library after being elected to office and residing in Albany. But curiously enough in these same serious book stores loads of that sort of fiction can be found which smuthounds of the Vice Society are eternally trying to banish from earth. Philadelphia, of course, specializes in Quaker literature; Buffalo, infected by the spirit of near East Aurora, is swamped with the things Elbert Hubbard used to love. Chicago discloses the peculiar love for art, literature and philosophy that its great percentage of German workmen brought over from their fatherland and left as inheritance to the second and third generation. It is almost incredible, yet true, that laborers, coming home from work in the stock yards, stop at the book stalls and buy an add volume of Kant, or Heines’ “Ballads and Poems.” Chicago always had the finest German books in the country, most likely brought over by the immigrants.
San Francisco has a touch of the East. Books on mysticism, have the honor place. Curious books of all kinds are bought eagerly. Indeed, the book stores here tell you the story of California’s strange cults, of its mystics, its prophets and its thousands and one seekers after the hidden truths of the universe.
The last ten years have wrought an astonishing change in the book stores all over the country, but nowhere a sadder and more lamentable one than in Boston, Mass.