Rebecca Stoner

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“Did you bring anything to read?” author Brendan Detzner asked as guests walk into Bad Grammar Theater, which also happens to be his home. Detzner and fellow author Mike Penkas were standing behind a table where their books and T-shirts are displayed for sale. Behind them was an unmade futon with a partially eaten pepperoni pizza nearby, and Macbook Air perched on a desk.

Bad Grammar hosts the only reading series that is part of Second Fridays in Pilsen. But the DIY appeal of Bad Grammar sets it apart from the chic vintage stores and funky, polished galleries that participate in the monthly art crawl. Detzner welcomes strangers into the top floor of his home, encouraging them to add their own stories to the evening’s program. Stories are read every half hour. They usually last 15-20 minutes, and then the audience disperses to chat. People tend to stay for a few stories, and then wander out for snacks or to visit other Second Fridays events. Many return later to hear more.

Bad Grammar does not require its authors to bring in fully polished finished products, so it’s easy for newcomers to walk right in. The work presented is far from amateurish, but the best way to describe the reading group is rough around the edges: they haven’t quite yet mastered the Chicago literary scene, but that doesn’t mean they don’t show promise.

As Penkas introduced the first story, he peered at the audience and asked, “How many of you are new here tonight?” Several of the guests seated in mismatched chairs around him raise their hands. “Shoot,” he said, and joked, “If I’d known, I would have just read some of my old stuff.” Although popular belief indicates that readings tailor the intellectual elite, the atmosphere in Detzner’s home was comfortable and inviting, a stage where storytelling is the focus and elaborate pomp is unnecessary.

Detzner got the idea for the monthly series after meeting talented Chicago authors through reading events at the former Edgewater bookstore Kate the Great’s. When a few of his favorite readings shut down earlier this year, Detzner decided, “It’s my turn to hold the football.”

Since many established readings are held in the Lincoln Park area, Detzner liked the idea of having an authors’ hub south of Roosevelt. He found this angular duplex in Pilsen, in the heart of the Chicago Arts District, and thought, “Hey, maybe some people will want to stop in and hear a story.” The location has a few distinct advantages, he says. “Most events have to persuade people to leave their homes and come across town. All we have to do is entice some of the hundreds of people who’ve already decided to come out to Second Fridays to walk fifteen feet.”

Detzner hopes the event will improve the visibility of local authors. He feels that he and many of the readers at Bad Grammar have been “screwed over by small presses,” who are quick to reject work from fledgling writers and provide little support to help promote and distribute their work. Having written two novels, Detzner says he wouldn’t mind selling some copies through the readings.

But Bad Grammar is about more than selling books. Detzner sees the value in reading before an audience, and believes it can actually improve the quality of the writing. He claims that reading his own work “makes me raise my standards when I’m writing,” and appreciates feedback from “people who don’t have any particular expectations or theory, and just know if they like what they heard or not.” He wants to extend the opportunity for this kind of productive criticism to other writers, in part because he thinks it can “provide a good incentive to not be self-indulgent or boring.”

The subject matter of the stories to follow ranged from zombies to the guilt faced by a drug dealer who believes he killed Kurt Cobain. Many of the pieces were humorous, shading into the realm of the absurd. The first story, for instance, featured a misanthropic nursing home attendant who described a knife fight between two residents as an impromptu production of West Side Story.

That night, the sparse turnout required Detzner to shoulder the responsibility of most of the reading. Penkas contributed one story, and an audience member named Brandon Sichling read his poem called, “Let’s Hear it For Menstruation.” Detzner seemed surprised by the low attendance. “I don’t know what’s up with tonight,” he said, “I’ve had like five readers before.”

Like many of the stories presented at the reading, Bad Grammar is still in development. Detzner hopes to attract more authors and a larger crowd, and to establish a warmer, more inviting atmosphere. Despite the Facebook event’s assertion that this is an event for both established and emerging authors, it seems that Detzner and his friends are still trying to establish their own niche in Chicago’s literary world. It’s a hard scene to break into, but it is, fortunately, willing to embrace authors who lack the benefit of a big name. Detzner admits that many of them are “still trying to make it work.” Bad Grammar’s a good start.

Bad Grammar Theater. 1743 S. Halsted St. Every second Friday of the month, 6-10pm.

To say that 1919 was a bad year would be to undersell it. Having lost 150,000 men in the killing fields of Europe, Americans started the interwar years with a slumping economy overseen by a sickly president. African-American soldiers returned to a nation that expected them to sit down now that they had successfully saved democracy for France. That year’s World Series proved that the American Pastime could be rigged. It was also, incidentally, the year when drinking your troubles away became a crime.

Reading through “Red Summer” by Cameron McWhirter is to watch the worst of America on a parade that pitilessly refuses to end. Dispensing taut, no-nonsense prose, the veteran Wall Street Journal reporter marches us through the most public racial atrocities to occur that year across the country. McWhirter’s narrative begins—as stories of this vile American vintage inevitably must—in the Jim Crow South, but unlike other accounts it does not remain confined there. It is a catalogue of savagery that takes care to include the whole Union, from our nation’s capital to flat, pacific Nebraska. Out of the ten locales, Chicago gets the most ink. Of all the violence that that sanguinary summer brought—the hangings, stonings, burnings, shootings, often in combination—the conflagration that broke out on the South Side was to become the symbol of the rotten state of race relations in America at large.

So why, as the Chicago Defender presciently put it the preceding spring, was “The Land of Lincoln and Grant stepping into the same column with Georgia and Mississippi?” McWhirter traces the origins of the smoldering tension to sudden changes in the city’s population. In the late 19th century, a flood of European immigration divided Chicago into a series of cantonized neighborhoods, separated by culture and ethnicity. By 1890, 40 percent of the city was foreign-born. The majority of this new wave of immigrants worked in factories and slaughterhouses that, with the dawning of the progressive era, were increasingly unionized. After a certain Archduke caught a bullet in Sarejevo, war ended the European influx. The needs of burgeoning industry were not sated, so factories began to look to black Southerners.  With the promise of employment, the Great Migration picked up speed. African-Americans, fleeing the legal inequality and impromptu pogroms of the Deep South, put up with wages and conditions that would have set Europeans striking.

As a result, industries used them to undermine unions, which usually excluded black workers. This tactic gave ordinarily fractious ethnic groups a common scapegoat for their woes. Gangs quickly formed.

The city’s black population was forced to inhabit derelict, overpriced housing, where landowners were able to exploit their obvious lack of options.  Desperation to quit these depressed areas led African-Americans south and fed white paranoia about the coming black “invasion.” McWhirter offers us glimpses into the racist Hyde Park-Kenwood Association, which winked at the fire bombing of black homes, browbeat realtors, and held posh meetings where leaders would spout vainglorious slogans like “They Shall Not Pass.” At the time, the phrase was meant to evoke the noble act of holding the line against the Huns at Verdun. It now reads like it’s been cribbed from some crackpot, sinister Gandalf.

After Eugene Williams’s body was recovered from the lake, witnesses identified the man who had thrown the rock and a crowd arrived to demand his arrest. When white police officers refused, a riot broke out. A number of whites were beaten, and not long after, rumor spread that there had been black-on-white drownings. The reprisals would rock the city, white gangs of up to a thousand men would walk into black neighborhoods and mercilessly attack everything they came across.

McWhirter’s chronicle of the known atrocities is appropriately exhaustive, the staggering number of incidents he manages to unearth from the historical record about Chicago alone is beyond dispiriting. A few low-lights include: 40 white youths sacking a South Side grocer and then gathering round to drown an aging black man in a sink, a black teen hauled off his bicycle and shot 14 times in retaliation for a baseless rumor, 200 men descending on a single black man to stab him to death, and a series of attacks on hospitals to ambush recovering victims. Then there was the wanton property destruction. Mobs gathered to stone and then loot black houses and a systemic arson campaign incinerated whole streets.

It was only at this point, this Nero-like nadir, with much of the South Side actually in flames, that Mayor Thompson decided that the situation was out of his control and called for 6,000 state troops to restore the peace. These disciplined young men are among the few Caucasians in the entire book that don’t come across as utterly contemptible. They brought order with an iron fist, but unlike this book’s invariably venal policemen they also raise their bayonets to protect black women and stop mobs from stringing men up from telephone poles. Throughout the Red Summer, President Wilson was too busy saving Europe to so much as comment on the carnage in his own country.

Few history books can make it into print (assuming they bother) these days without the obligatory cache of photos nestled inside. Accompanying Red Summer are stills from Chicago showing demolished South Side houses, a frenetic white mob storming a home, and rioters bludgeoning a man to death with bricks.  But it’s the photo of the lynching of Willie Brown that finally haunts you. A group of 40 normal-looking Nebraskan males are huddled close together, grinning broadly, as a human body burns in the foreground.

McWhirter tries valiantly to keep this book from being the most singularly depressing text you’ve ever set eyes on. In between the numerous lynchings he asks the reader to imagine, he discusses the rise of the NAACP and how the Red Summer fueled the tireless advocacy of leaders like Ida B. Wells and W.E. B. Dubois. In a coda, McWhirter serendipitously finds in rural Georgia a descendant of a man whose gruesome lynching he has described. McWhirter then reflects on the immense progress implied by the fact this man could reach the highest levels in the state that butchered his family. These silver linings, needless to say, feel more than a little bit forced. The anti-lynching legislation, for all the advocacy and evidence, had to wait another 40 years. The fact that 80 years later his grandson could live with basic dignity does not feel like a genuine coup for human decency.

It’s particularly jarring to be trudging this through this historical horror show, while in the background on CNN politicians are traipsing through cornfields waxing less-than-poetic about American exceptionalism. The statement that the United States is this orb’s greatest democracy with its most humane, compassionate people should be treated like the dangerous proposition that it is. On one of the most crucial tests of the 20th century we failed or, in the more alarming leap, were average. The point of contemplating an unpardonable past is to ensure no part of its legacy touches. The fact that, as of last year, Chicago remains the nation’s third-most segregated city means Cameron McWhirter’s book should be considered required reading. The dividing lines were drawn in red.

After a series of lengthy introductions, the tall, 73-year-old woman walked daintily up to the podium.  She thanked the speakers for their fulsome praise before adding, modestly, that the oft-recited list “makes me feel just a tiny, wee bit posthumous.” Oates continued, “I spend so much time in solitary confinement with my own thoughts, it’s nice every once in a while to go out and remember that there is another world out there.”

She began by reading a story from her collection, “Sourland,” which chronicles a widow’s encounter with a male interloper. At first Oates’s storytelling seemed perfunctory. But as the tale progressed, the thrill of the plot and the strength of her prose seemed to mesmerize even the fabulist. Her hands quavered with her heroine’s, her body shrank with fright before bristling with rage, and she performed the antagonist’s Slavic accent with gusto.

Oates dropped humor into the conversation, alternating between pearls of wisdom and witticisms as effortlessly as Tina Fey. In response to loaded questions about grief, Oates would occasionally answer with self-deprecating schtick. She reenacted a series of hysterical scenes from her recent memoir, mimicking the antics of well-meaning friends as flawlessly as the condescension of her cats.

After the reading was over, attendees frantically picked up tomes they had stashed under chairs. A sizable group huddled around a card table that sagged under the weight of about a tenth of Ms. Oates’ oeuvre.  Oates was generous with her time, but no one in the queue stayed long. They were careful not to linger, as if afraid that the hours Joyce Carol Oates spent in Hyde Park had just cost posterity ten glorious pages. (Christopher Riehle)

Terence Lee

O’Gara & Wilson—an antiquarian bookstore and modest survivor of a battle that has left the bookselling industry badly wounded—has carved a unique place for itself in its community. Across the street from Powell’s bookstore on 57th Street, O’Gara & Wilson has a long heritage that can be traced back to 1882 when it was founded by a Mr. Hewitt to be a bookstore for rare and used books. Over the years the shop has been located and relocated around Chicago, responding to rising rents, fluctuating demand and displacements by more glittering shelves than its wooden bookcases can offer. At last settling in its current location in Hyde Park around fifteen years ago, it has been the regular haunt of booklovers from all walks of life. “It’s a weird little romantic place,” says Lydia Laurenson, a former employee who still maintains the bookstore’s blog. Yet despite the free-flowing phrase showered upon the adored shopkeeper, Wilson has again been drawing short straws, as technology blossoms and the bookselling industry wilts.

The meticulous apprentice of Joseph O’Gara, Wilson has nursed the bookstore for as long as many people can remember. “He’s got a real love for bookselling,” said Lydia, “He’s really made some sacrifices to keep it open. Bookstores have been closing left and right these days, it’s a testament to how much he has loved the store, keeping up with the times and taking losses himself in order to keep it open.” It seems that Wilson has been a devoted boss, bookseller and man, and indeed his unassuming romanticism rolls off him in the ounceful, as he pulls up a red leather chair in his beloved shop, adjusting his glasses in earnest preparation for this interview.

Terence Lee

Chicago Weekly: How old is this shop? Who started it?

Wilson: Booksellers tend to be like gypsies, they have pretty much always led marginal existences. When rents rise, when neighborhoods gentrify and the rents go up the economics of the bookstore no longer work so booksellers move. Jerrold Nedwick booksellers (Jerry is who Joe O’Gara apprenticed under) had, I think, 6 or 8 locations in a 25-year period. The same thing happened with Joe O’Gara and we moved here 15 years ago after 23 years down the street at 1311 E. 57th Street.

CW: So over time through all its iterations O’Gara Wilson has always been an antiquarian bookstore? Or was it ever just a used bookstore?

Wilson: We call ourselves an “antiquarian and used bookstore” so as not to exclude anything. I am perhaps making an error trying to achieve something that can never be achieved, and trying to be all things to all people […] but I want to have rare Americana and I want to have dollar Agatha Christie paperbacks.

CW: Why did you rule out the idea of selling unused books?

Wilson: Because it’s so incredibly boring. For people who like old books, there’s a whole world of books. You’re talking about hundreds of years of production of books you’ve never imagined, never hoped to ever see. In the new book trade all you have is what the publishers are putting out that year, and it’s very predictable and you can get as many copies as you want. My kind of persona, and the personas of other people who become used booksellers become incredibly bored.

CW: How do you balance being a good businessman with stocking what you think is important?

Wilson: Well there has to be a correspondence between what you stock and what people are looking for. The basics are transported to you during your apprenticeship. Just being in a bookshop for a certain period of time and paying attention to what sells quickly, versus what sits on a shelf for six years, and ends up being discounted to at or below what you paid just to get rid of it, hones your perception. Bad books become invisible to you. The ones that jump into focus when you’re scanning a box or a basement or someone’s library shelf are ones you’ve had good experiences with.

CW: What got you started in the bookselling industry?

Wilson: When I was first starting the book trade I almost had an addiction to buying books. I had an attic room in my parents’ house, which I built shelves in. I found out that books could be bought fairly cheaply in resale stores like Salvation Army and Goodwill. I would go every Saturday and look at their new offerings. But I was on a limited budget so many times I would see books that I wasn’t particularly interested in, but I had a sense might still have some value because other people would be interested in them. So in order to finance the books that I wanted to keep, I would buy books I didn’t want and sell them to bookstores like Mr. O’Gara’s.

CW: How much of your collecting is based purely on aesthetics?

Wilson: Well there are some people that want it all, they want books that look nice in their living space, and that they’re interested in, and I think that’s a commendable way to approach book collecting. There was a philosopher called William Morris who started the arts and crafts movement in England, a reaction to the shoddy workmanship […] of machine made goods, who had a saying that I heard very early on in my twenties, “have nothing in your homes which you do not know to be useful and believe to be beautiful.” That’s one thing that induces people to come to a place like this.

CW: How’s the store been doing in light of the progression in the bookselling industry?

Wilson: I have no complaints if I’m doing poorly, it’s either because I’m not working hard enough or it means the world is changing in a way that doesn’t favor this type of work. You mentioned that a lot of people express loyalties and great fondness for this kind of place and I know its coming from their hearts.

CW: So you set prices based on what you think you can get for a book?

Wilson: The minimal we can do to keep us alive is sell [at 300%] of what we pay. The internet has acted as an ability for people to know all things. Prior to the internet you would go to your local bookstore and ask for a book you were looking for. Most of the time their answer to you would be no because there’re millions of out of print books. Eventually you might find a bookseller that had one and it might be a little bit more pricey, but you would jump and buy it. Now all this pent up demand for books that people can’t find is satisfied because they can find it online. Pent up demand brought people into bookshops, now people find books instantaneously on the internet.

CW: You’ve gone online as well though, haven’t you?

Wilson: Yes, we decided that if we were losing 10% of our business to the internet, we should make 10% of our sales on the internet. This has been incrementally increased over time. Now about 20-25% of our sales are on the internet. There are still a lot of people who love to browse, who love the serendipity of finding books they didn’t even know existed, the tactile adventure of being able to handle a book.

CW: Have you ever thought about maybe selling coffee, or having places for people to sit and read?

Wilson: For a period of time, I toyed with the idea. Next door we had a restaurant called Café Florian and out of neighborliness, I didn’t want to give away what my neighbors were trying to sell. On a couple of occasions I said to them that we’d be willing to take out a couple of bookcases and cut a counter (with the permission of the landlord) so people could buy their coffee through the window, but they were never interested in doing that.

CW: Have you ever found someone who could be your apprentice?

Wilson: I often think I probably should be looking. But then previous generations didn’t have change like we’re having now. I have one employee who has all the talent [to be my apprentice], all the good sense and all the enthusiasm, but I don’t know if I’d be doing him a favor if I convinced him to become a bookseller. I certainly would be very pleased and gratified if when I was done I could pass the torch on as it has been passed to me but bookselling is transforming into a completely different animal. I don’t know that there’re too many booksellers who are training apprentices right now because there aren’t too many young people who think of it as an exciting, viable way to make a living. I hope that turns around, I hope that there’re stores like this 100 years from now but things are changing so quickly it could go one way or the other.

The mic was open to people of all persuasions to rhyme or rap about their faith. The call received an eclectic response. One grad student cited both John Calvin and Sufjan Stevens as inspirations, another undergrad delivered a rhythmic tirade against the perception of mainstream Chinese culture as faithless, and a third staged a conversation with the Almighty, mixing burning theological queries with questions like “will I ever manage to finish that paper?”

The evening’s headliner, nationally renowned hip-hop artist Capital D, arrived in a crisp tan suit fresh off work from his blue-chip law firm in the Loop. Capital D’s rap condemned gang violence and chronicled his conversion to Islam, but he saved his most incisive lyrics for American and Israeli foreign policy: “We say we’re hated for our freedom’s, but maybe it’s the hate that hate created, lets debate it, we’re five percent of the population, but using 25 percent of the world’s resources, and making up the difference through the use of armed forces.”

Some of the evening’s most memorable lines, however, came from Illinois Institute of Technology senior Leena Suleiman about halfway through the program. A devout Muslim, she spoke strongly of 9/11’s aftermath: “So don’t tell me I am failing at freedom / Don’t tell me that I must conform to be accepted / Don’t tell me lies, because my truth sees right through them.”

The evening’s unlikely coda came in form of Clarence, a member of the housekeeping staff, who had been set to clean the shop as midnight loomed. Sidling up to the mic, Clarence whipped out his flip phone and began reciting with growing confidence poetry he’d texted to his friends about observations around campus. He recalled a scene from earlier in the week, when he watched a little boy run in circles, disobeying his father: “I thought it was so cool, that little boy out there doing a happy dance, so free and innocent. I wish we all could get a little bit of that back.” (Chris Riehle)

This was not the first time that Kennedy, an up-and-coming author based in Chicago, was confronting the beloved figure. At the American Library Association conference in Chicago last July, a costumed Kennedy challenged a look-alike of Gaiman in a duel for the Newbery Award. With Gaiman in Chicago again, this time Kennedy’s showdown was the real thing.

Yet Gaiman was not there to clear his name, nor was he there for a fight. Taking the stage, he acknowledged Kennedy’s act as “the best” introduction he had been given to date. He then pulled out his best-selling novel “Neverwhere,” and proceeded to read. It was a journey down to the urban underground of London, (“London below”), an urban fantasy that takes the typical witches, wizards, and warriors, and transposes them into the grimy reality of the homeless.

Despite its setting, the novel was very much home in Chicago, where its first theatrical rendtion was performed by Lifeline Theater, a group that specializes in literary adaptations, and is now touring worldwide. Now, “Neverwhere” has returned to the city as the chosen work for the Chicago Public Library’s “One Book, One Chicago” program, which selects a new book biannually for the whole city to read together.

After the reading, Gaiman decided to take the audience through a bit of a trip into his own Chicago.  He proceeded to describe the “House of Clocks,” located in “The Shambles,” a made-up district  that survived the Great Fire. The work, “A Walking Tour of the Shambles,” was part of a collaboration he did for the 2002 World Horror Convention with another Chicagoan, renowned author Gene Wolfe. Gaiman admitted it was Wolfe’s characterization of Chicago in the book “Free, Live Free,” which inspired the London landscape in “Neverwhere.” Gaiman bridged the final gap between fantasy and reality, answering questions from his fans. One reader asked the question on all of our minds—“How do you get to ‘Chicago Below?’”

“I think that’s up for you to find out,” replied Gaiman.

Courtesy of Co-Prosperity Sphere

Type is all around us. We see it on billboards, in magazines, and across our computer screens. It’s so ubiquitous that associating its design with any particular city seems a bit odd. But Dawn Hancock, co-curator of Typeforce 2, the Second Annual Showing of Emerging Typographic Allstars, points out that many artists interested in pursuing typography feel obligated to move to New York, which has long been a center for the craft. Typeforce 2, which opened last Friday at Bridgeport’s Co-Prosperity Sphere, makes a strong case for Chicago’s place as the second city of typographic design.

The official poster for the event (designed by Sonnenzimmer, a graphic art and screen printing studio) features the famous Swiss typographer Jan Tschichold. According to Hancock, Tschichold “wanted to do typography that was different for his time.” The work displayed at the Co-Prosperity Sphere largely follows his example. The exhibit emphasizes creative and innovative presentation while taking for granted readability and legibility, two fundamental concepts in typographic design. “Crackle Crack” by Frances MacLeod and Caroline MacLeod displays onomatopoeia in textual form, expressing the sound of words like “ribbit”, “splat”, and “plop” through font work and graphic design. Another piece, “Typefreaks” by Quite Strong, a checkerboard of circus posters, likens typographic oddities such as the semicolon, index/fist, and interrobang to a bearded lady and two-headed marvel.

The theme of elevating type from the everyday to the heights of fine art recurs throughout the exhibit, but one artist, Bill Talsma, takes this idea to a new level. His pieces, “What’s On Your Mind,” “Change,” and “Recent Activity” feature text from Facebook, displayed with authenticity in Lucida Grande as if they were pasted from a screenshot. But this text is not just posted on a wall. Instead, it is displayed conspicuously on a series of lacquered plaques accompanied by a silver-plated trophy, an award given in exchange for a status update. Talsma says he hopes to establish an unconscious connection with the viewer through the familiar display of lettering, mirroring the automatic interrelation between any piece of text and its reader.

One difference that distinguishes this year’s show from Typeforce 1 is the method by which the artists were chosen. In 2010, the curators hand-selected designers based on work they displayed on the streets of Chicago. Once the artists were approved, they were given free reign to create whatever they wanted for the show. “This year,” Hancock states, “we put out an open call for submissions,” and the pieces on display are the best of that pool. But while this year’s artists were not necessarily selected because of their work displayed in Chicago, it’s clear that the emerging Typographic Allstars of 2011 draw their inspiration from the city. One screen print by Sonnenzimmer, for example, takes text from a poster advertising an event at the North Side music venue the Empty Bottle. Designer Matthew Hoffman takes notes on his phone while walking around the city and works these thoughts into his type later. His window display, the most geometrically interesting piece on display at Typeforce, abstractly resembles a city skyline, featuring high-rises made of bass wood with carved-out letters.

The artists’ hometown pride extends beyond inspiration for the exhibit. Nick Adam, whose work at Typeforce spans the length of the back wall, started the Mayor Daley Forever campaign, designing campaign posters and T-shirts as if Daley were running for this year’s election (and every election thereafter). According to a statement on Adam’s website, this campaign commemorates Daley’s “political brilliance [and] acknowledges his personal sacrifice to the people and city of Chicago.” Hancock explains that because she and most of the people who helped put together the exhibit hail from Chicago, it is especially important to her to find a place for the city at the forefront of typographic design. By bringing these artists together, Hancock and the Co-Prosperity Sphere are proving that, in the world of type, Chicago is a force to be reckoned with.

Co-Prosperity Sphere, 3219 S Morgan St. Through March 7. Hours by appointment. Free. (773)837-0145. coprosperity.org

Sponsored by the Poetry Foundation and the University of Chicago’s Program in Poetry and Poetics, “Poetry off the Shelf: Elizabeth Bishop’s Correspondence with the New Yorker” commemorated the 100th anniversary of the birth of poet Elizabeth Bishop and of the recent publication of a collection of her letters, “Elizabeth Bishop and the New Yorker: The Complete Correspondence.” Through a dramatic reading, the evening showcased the delightfully multifaceted relationship between one of America’s most revered writers and one of its most respected magazines. Actors read selections from “Elizabeth Bishop and the New Yorker”; the volume’s editor, Joelle Biele, who was present for the performance and answered questions at the wine-and-cheese reception afterwards, compiled the script herself. Pithy quips and musings about the writing life abounded, both from Bishop herself and from other literary luminaries with whom she was in contact (Harold Ross, William Maxwell, Catherine White, and Robert Giroux figured prominently): “Punctuation is my Waterloo. I must get a book on the subject” (Bishop), and “I think the word ‘fabulous’ should be regarded with suspicion” (Ross). Occasional laugh-out-loud lines brought the previously somber “poetry crowd” to titter heartily, acknowledging that yes, reading other people’s mail can be quite a pleasure.

Miller is situated in the middle of the Vivian Harsh Collection, which grew to its current size after Jacqueline Goldsby, a former associate professor at the University of Chicago, began to reorganize and add to the archives. In 2004, Goldsby stepped into the Woodson Regional Library intent on jumpstarting a reading forum. Driven by the desire to expose the public to African-American works of literature, especially those from the often overlooked Chicago Renaissance of the 1940s and ‘50s, she began to search for texts. Goldsby delved into the Vivian Harsh Collection, which includes the Special Negro Collection, a selection of texts and documents first brought together by Vivian Harsh, the first black librarian in the Chicago Public Library’s system. Harsh was determined to raise awareness  about Midwestern African-American literature through newspaper articles and books that were difficult to access – a goal Goldsby intended to  take on as well. But Goldsby soon realized the challenges she faced: most of the works remained uncategorized, and the archives lacked an archival finding aid, a document containing information about the texts in the collection. Goldsby found obtaining the texts she needed was impossible.

“You see, we had everything here but there was no way for anyone to find any of the materials they needed,” Miller explains. “Jacky wasn’t the first to notice that, but unlike most people she went and did something about it.”

Determined to  make the Collection accessible to the community, Goldsby approached Woodson Regional’s senior archivist, Michael Flug. The two began work on an archival project. Noting that the Vivian Harsh Collection did not possess the necessary funds to reorganize and expand the archives, Goldsby approached the UofC and fought for a grant to expand the Collection. Her efforts were rewarded: the University’s Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture granted Goldsby $5,000 to spearhead her project. Named “Mapping the Stacks”, Goldsby’s project called for extensive preservation work for the texts,  reorganization of the Vivian Harsh Collection, and the creation of a finding aid so that documents could be easily located. With the cooperation of UofC faculty, Goldsby recruited dedicated graduate students to handle documents relevant to their field of study, not only to provide them with experience working with an archive, but to also bolster their studies with documents that were, until recently, really hard to find. Soon, students and library staff alike adopted Goldsby’s vision of ensuring that material found in the archives would reach the wider community.

After six years with library staff and students working 40 hours a week, the Vivian Harsh Collection now holds 70,000  books, 500  periodical titles, and  5,000 reels of film. Original manuscripts from famous black journalists and writers like Richard Wright and Langston Hughes make the Collection an integral part of African-American literary history. The University acknowledges its value as an academic and cultural resource, and now the Humanities department provides $19,000 a year to foster continued growth. Proper categorization has extended the Collection’s reach, teaching generations of residents about African-American history, literature, music, and film. But the Vivian Harsh Collection does not limit itself to only the community or Chicago; the sheer volume of information establishes the archive on an international level as well. To prove this point, Miller motions to a fair-skinned brunette girl who busily flips through a file, typing on her computer all the while.

“This girl here is from the University of Manchester,” Miller remarks. “It doesn’t matter if you’re a sixthgrader from around here or a university kid from England; this collection’s for everybody. We’re internationally known!”

Woodson Regional Library. 9525 S. Halsted St. (312)747-6900. chipublib.org/branch/details/library/woodson-regional

For nearly 50 years, the intricate maze of books that lies at the bottom of a steep staircase in the basement of the Chicago Theological Seminary building at 5757 South University Avenue in Hyde Park has been an incredibly popular place to get lost. The Seminary Co-op Bookstore’s labyrinthine layout and inviting alcoves filled with texts entice visitors to venture further and further down its book-lined hallways, thumbing through pages of works they never intended to find. As the minutes and hours pass by unnoticed, patrons find themselves losing track of everything but the words on the page before them. After being thrust back into reality by a creaking shelf or a sudden passerby, the bookstore’s visitors often depart with grins on their faces, feeling as though they have just left a magical place.

That’s the romantic view, at least. For some members, and especially for the bookstore’s staff, the basement location isn’t quite so charming. Its small, meandering corridors are an air-circulation nightmare, especially during the summer months, when the bookstore starts feeling like it was built in an armpit. And despite the twisting floor plan, the space lacks the capacity to carry as many books as the Co-op’s owners would like; employees have to work within frustratingly confined conditions, amid stacks of documents and boxes filled with new arrivals. For readers, the joy of getting completely absorbed in a book can be dangerous, as the store’s menacing network of low-hanging pipes dishes out bruises indiscriminately. The current space is threatened by other natural hazards during heavy storms, when the risk of floods and power outages looms over the underground bookstore. For many, then, it was a considerable relief when the University of Chicago purchased the seminary building in 2008 and began making arrangements to move the bookstore to a more spacious location. By the beginning of 2012, the more than 150,000 books lining the walls will be moved one block east to a newly redesigned space in the empty McGiffert House, at 5751 South Woodlawn Avenue.

Mehves Konuk

The bookstore was established in its current location in 1961, when 17 original investors put up ten dollars each to start a cooperative. The building’s location, across the street from a campus filled with knowledge-craving students, helped establish the independent Seminary Co-op Bookstore as a major part of University life. Since its founding, the Co-op’s membership has grown considerably, topping off at nearly 54,000 current members and boasting hundreds of patrons abroad. Throughout the years, the Co-op’s cavernous hallways have played host to three generations of students, many famous authors, a few Nobel laureates, and even President Barack Obama.

The success of the original store prompted the Co-op to expand. In 1983 it opened its second Hyde Park location, 57th Street Books, and in 1995 it began operating the Newberry Library Bookstore on the Near North Side. Whereas the original Co-op location is lauded for its incredible selection of academic texts, these sister stores appeal to popular and family audiences. The selections in all three bookstores often reflect the communities around them.

The Co-op’s long relationship with the University took on a new character in 2008 when the University purchased the Chicago Theological Seminary building. In July 2010, University officials and Co-op employees announced that the University would fund the Co-op’s move to the McGiffert house.

Once the bookstore vacates the basement in early 2012 and the seminary itself heads to a new building south of the Midway Plaisance, the structure will undergo extensive renovations, including desperately needed upgrades to its heating and mechanical systems. The current seminary building will likely become the new home of the UofC’s Department of Economics, and the interior spaces will be renovated accordingly.

This careful repair and repurposing, termed “adaptive reuse” in the University’s plan, will also bring the Milton Friedman Institute for Research in Economics (MFIRE) to the building. The presence of the MFIRE has been a source of much debate, with many faculty and students decrying the retooling of a theological seminary and bookstore into an institution that takes its name and many of its basic assumptions from a highly controversial economist. But these two symbols of the University are not such easy opposites—after all, Friedman himself was a member of the Co-op—and whatever legitimate objections there are to MFIRE, they are largely peripheral to the bookstore’s move. University of Chicago News Director Steven Kloehn says, “Promoting business in Hyde Park is one of our core values,” and at least in the case of the Co-op’s relocation, the situation is win-win. The University acquires a historic building conveniently located right across from the main quadrangles, while the Co-op gets a much more open and accessible space that can be tailored to fit its specific needs.

Mehves Konuk

After careful deliberation by a panel of bookstore staff and University administrators and students, the architectural firm Tigerman-McCurry was chosen to overhaul the McGiffert House. Stanley Tigerman, who is spearheading the project, is a native Chicagoan and a long time member of the Co-op. Tigerman and the Co-op share a common approach. As the bookstore’s current general manager Jack Cella puts it, “Tigerman-McCurry was a brilliant choice. Stanley represents what people value in the Co-operative. Local focus. Not glitzy.”

By virtue of its existing condition (i.e. being above ground and having windows) and due to planned renovations, the new space will be a far cry from the cramped and sometimes difficult-to-access basement that currently houses the bookstore. Whereas customers enter the current location either by a forbiddingly steep staircase or a tedious system of ramps and elevators, the McGiffert House’s nearly 9,000 feet of floor space will be more accessible and convenient for members and the community. In a public letter to Co-op members and customers, Cella wrote: “The new store will have windows (imagine that!), will be completely accessible, and will have operational temperature and air circulation controls. We may bring a pipe along for the occasional customer who feels nostalgic for a place to bump his or her head.”

The accessibility of the new space means that hosting authors and events will be more feasible; there are even plans for a café where patrons can thumb through their purchases. And at a time when most bookstores have been forced to cut corners and decrease their inventories, the Co-op’s enlarged space will grant it the unique opportunity to expand its already colossal collection of texts. “We’d like to expand our physics section,” says Cella. “And it would be nice to have books in other languages. The challenge is to try to continue what people already value in a place that is just friendlier.”

And though surely some will be nostalgic for the winding corridors and secluded alcoves of the old location, Cella is certain that moving is the best call for the Co-op and its customers. “People are familiar with this space. Many great scholars have come through. It lends itself to people being surprised. But that only works if you have the right books to discover,” Cella asserts. “But we’re not trying to be a big-box store after the move. We will continue to try to be the best store we can for the community.” And while the Co-op’s focus is on providing a better space for the community, the new location adjacent to Frank Lloyd Wright’s visionary Robie House is likely to draw visitors from farther afield as well.

Loyalists to the original labyrinth should be happy to hear that the new space will, to some degree, reflect the quirky feel of the basement that was the bookstore’s home for half a century. Tigerman has summed up the feel of the plan for the new space in a single word: “Books.” His design is based around a series of “figural voids”: islands of structured shelves that readers can physically enter and explore, a new interpretation of the experience of getting lost in a world of books.

So while it’s unlikely that any space could perfectly replicate that intricate web below the seminary, it appears that the Co-op’s move will be less like the end of an era and more like another chapter in the life of a bookstore and the neighborhood that produced it. “We are a creature of this community,” says Cella. “Books are the centerpiece, but we take our flavor from the South Side of Chicago.”