Column: Chicago has long been a place for book lovers, and book sellers

Chicago Tribune

22-04-2025

In the Sunday book section of the New York Times, you'll find the Literary Destinations feature. This relatively new weekend addition to the paper is intended as one 'in which authors provide literary guides to their cities, including book recommendations that capture a sense of everyday life and the local cultural landscape.'
The author of this week's offering is Rebecca Makkai, a stunningly fine novelist of, as the Times notes, five works of fiction, including the Pulitzer finalist 'The Great Believers.'
She begins her piece by writing, 'Chicago is too big, enormous in both geography and spirit, to capture in its entirety. Locals understand this.' Later, she writes of the 'DNA of Chicago: neighborhood as subject, neighborhood as map of the heart.'
I couldn't agree more. Read what she has to say in her short essay and then see what specific books and authors she recommends. Buy and read one, or more.
Could any Chicago reading list not contain Theodore Dreiser's 'Sister Carrie,' Richard Wright's 'Black Boy,' Carl Sandburg's 'Chicago Poems' or Saul Bellow's 'The Adventures of Augie March'? These usual suspects are joined by titles by such other dead giants as Studs Terkel, Nelson Algren and Gwendolyn Brooks (including her poetry collection 'Annie Allen' and for her only novel 'Maud Martha'). The list also includes such worthy, very much alive authors as Stuart Dybek ('The Coast of Chicago'), Alex Kotlowitz ('There Are No Children Here' and 'An American Summer'), Mark Larson ('Ensemble'), Aleksandar Hemon ('The Lazarus Project') and Audrey Niffenegger ('The Time-Traveler's Wife').
There's more and whether intended or not, Makkai's offering is timely and useful, because this coming Saturday is Independent Bookstore Day. It's a national effort by the American Booksellers Association, to celebrate the country's independent book stores (more information at www.bookweb.org).
There are events in every state and dozens of cities. And so do we happily have the 2025 Chicagoland Indie Bookstore Day Crawl. Go to www.chilovebooks.com for a handy map and lots of information about the more than 50 book stores you can visit, many of them having specials, events and surprises.
Ellen Hanson is looking forward to Saturday. She is one of the newest members of that small, exclusive, hardworking gang called bookstore owners. She owns Sandmeyer's, a charming space at 714 S. Dearborn.
'I have always wanted to own a bookstore but spent my working life in professional services,' she told me over the weekend. 'After I retired in 2020 I was, frankly, bored. My neighbor Ellen Sandmeyer was selling her store (which she opened with her late husband Ulrich Sandmeyer in 1982) and so I bought it and have been happy ever since.'
There have been some surprises — 'the astonishing number of books that are published,' she says — but she is enthusiastic and optimistic about the future for independent book stores. Though COVID wasn't good for much, book folks have benefitted from increased traffic in stores due to, of all things, the pandemic.
As Louis Menard put it in a New Yorker magazine story last year, 'Since the end of the pandemic, there has been a small but significant uptick in the number of independent bookstores. … Reading turned out to be a popular way of passing the time in lockdown, more respectable than binge-watching or other diversions one might think of. A slight decline in sales over the past couple of years suggests that people felt freed up to go out and play pickleball instead of staying home and trying to finish 'War and Peace.''
Hanson says, 'The community has been very supportive.' She is looking forward to Saturday's crawl and to the annual Printers Row Lit Fes t, which will take over the neighborhood September 6-7.
So, what books should you buy?
You can't go wrong with any of Makkai's suggestions. But if you are looking for something more, I recommend 'The Bookshop: The History of the American Bookstore' by Evan Friss, which my colleague John Warner wrote about in the Tribune a few months ago, saying that the book reminds us 'that the constants for what makes a bookstore are the people and the books in community with each other.'
Friss does not ignore the numbers, informing us that 'In 1958, Americans purchased 72% of their books from small, single-store, personal bookshops. … As recently as 1993, the US Census Bureau counted 13,499 bookstores. … By 2021, however, there were just 5,591 bookstores left.'
He also writes, 'Bookstores may be endangered spaces, but they are also powerful spaces.' His book is not a deep dive into the nuts and bolts of the business of books. Rather it is a series of 13 sections, each devoted to what Friss considers notable bookstores and their owners, from Benjamin Franklin and his print shop to Amazon's stores.
What grabbed me was Chapter 4 and its 20 pages devoted the important, influential role the city has played in the business of books. Focusing on Marshall Field & Company and its once massive book department on the third floor of its main store in the Loop, he cites a British writer who in 1920 described it as 'to ordinary English bookshops like a liner to a houseboat. (It is) said to be the largest bookstore in the world.'
It was then one of 164 bookstores in the city, run by an innovative, autocratic woman named Marcella Burns Hafner, barely 5 feet tall but of such forcefulness that she was referred to, in whispers of course, as the Czarina. She is mentioned in another book, 1952's 'Give the Lady What She Wants,' written by my father, Herman Kogan, and his newspapering pal, Lloyd Wendt. They wrote, 'Her section became the most famous book department in the country. She staged Chicago's first book fair … originated the idea of autographing parties.'
She was a real life character worthy of, well, a novel.