It was not I, but a zombie moving mechanically toward the future, who touched the button, left the room, and softly shut the door.
8
On the Avenue
In all my life, I had never shopped on Michigan Avenue. I had no idea who was in business there or what they sold (except for a general feeling that they sold expensive merchandise and made plenty of money). It was only after I had opened the doors of Stuart Brent: Books and Records, that I discovered what a strategic location I had chosen ... strategically in competition with two of the best-known book dealers in the city!
Only a block down the street was the Main Street Book Store, already a fixture on the Avenue for a decade. A few blocks farther south stood Kroch’s, Chicago’s largest bookseller and one of the greatest in America, while north of me the Michigan Avenue branch of Lyon and Healy, the great music store, still flourished. And I thought what the Avenue needed was Stuart Brent with his books and records! Maybe it was, but the outlook did not seem propitious.
Now, ten years later, Main Street and I are still selling books and not, I think, suffering from each other’s proximity. Main Street’s orientation has always been toward art, and they run a distinguished gallery in connection with their business. Lyon and Healy eventually closed its branch operation, and Kroch’s left the Avenue when they merged with Brentano, an equally large organization with which I have no family connection, on the Italian side or any other. These consolidations, I am sure, were simply manifestations of big business. If I were to fret about the competition, it would be that of the dime store next door, which sells books and records, too.
In addition to the street-level floor, my new shop had a fine basement room which I fitted out hopefully as a meeting place. I immediately began staging lectures and parties and put in a grand piano so we could have concerts, too. Anything to bring in people. Business grew, but as I soon found I would have to sell things besides books in order to meet the overhead, I compromised on long-standing principles and brought in greeting cards. Within six months, I was also selling “how to do it books”—how to eat, how to sleep, how to love, how to fix the leaky pipe in your basement, how to pet your cat, how to care for your dog, how to see the stars....
By the time I had been on the Avenue a year, it was hard for me to see how my shop differed from any other where you might find some good books and records if you looked under the pop numbers and bestsellers[bestsellers]. Apparently some people still found a difference, however. In his book The Literary Situation, Malcolm[Malcolm] Cowley, the distinguished critic, wrote:
On Michigan Avenue, I passed another shop and recognized the name on the window. Although the salesroom wasn’t large, it was filled with new books lining the walls or piled on tables. There were also two big racks of long-playing records, and a hidden phonograph was playing Mozart as I entered (feeling again that I was a long way from Clark and Division). The books on the shelves included almost everything published during the last two or three years that I had any curiosity about reading. In two fields the collection was especially good: psychiatry and books by Chicago authors.
I introduced myself to the proprietor, Stuart Brent, and found that he was passionately interested in books, in the solution of other people’s personal problems, and in his native city. Many of his customers are young people just out of college. Sometimes they tell him about their problems and he says to them, “Read this book. You might find the answer there.” He is mildly famous in the trade for his ability to sell hundreds of copies of a book that arouses his enthusiasm: for example, he had probably found more readers for Harry Stack Sullivan’s An Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry than any other dealer in the country, even the largest. Collections of stories are usually slow-moving items in bookstores, although they have proved to be more popular as paperbacks. One evening Brent amazed the publisher of Nelson Algren’s stories, The Neon Wilderness, by selling a thousand copies of the hardcover[hardcover] book at an autograph party.
We talked about the days when the Near North Side was full of young authors—many of whom became famous New Yorkers—and about the possibility of another Chicago renaissance, as in the years after 1915. Brent would like to do something to encourage such a movement. He complained that most of the other booksellers didn’t regard themselves as integrated parts of the community and that they didn’t take enough interest in the personal needs of their customers.... Brent’s complaint against the booksellers may well have been justified, from his point of view, but a visitor wouldn’t expect to find that any large professional group was marked by his combination of interest in persons, interest in the cultural welfare of the community, and abounding energy.