By The Beachwood Booksellers Affairs Division
“Long before the advent of the megabookstore, there was a place of pilgrimage for readers and writers on North Michigan Avenue, presided over by Stuart Brent, who was not merely a merchant but literature’s self-appointed local guardian,” the Tribune reports.
“Mr. Brent, who opened his first store in 1946 and closed his last one half a century later, would periodically get up from behind a stack of publishers invoices on the round table that served as his desk to take a book from a customer’s hand and substitute another he thought would be a better read.
“Mr. Brent, 98, died Thursday at a hospital in Ashland, Wis., near his farm, said his daughter Susan Brent-Millner.”
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“He attended the University of Chicago where he earned a degree in education before service in the Army in World War II. After the war he opened a small bookshop on Rush Street that he called the Seven Stairs, for the number of steps it took to descend to its door,” the University of Chicago Press notes.
“Brent was also an author: of Seven Stairs, a memoir of his early years in bookselling (still in print) and of a series of books for children.”
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“In his half-century on or near North Michigan Avenue, Stuart Brent has been called every name in the book, good, bad, but rarely indifferent,” John Blades wrote in the Tribune in 1996. “His tempestuous fortunes as a bookseller brought him comparisons to everyone from the prophet Jeremiah, for his jeremiads about discounters and other philistines, to Muhammad Ali, for his skill at promoting himself as aggressively as his books (‘I’m the greatest!’). Until recently, the best description of Brent may have come from Saul Bellow, who called him a ‘cheerful Job’ for his ability to roll with the punches, to rebound from fate’s hardest knocks with an obstinate smile.
“But even someone as stubbornly upbeat and full of self-esteem as Brent could find little redeeming cheer lately after a series of Job-like afflictions, physical, emotional and economic. ‘It’s been hard punishment for me,’ he said, ‘and I frankly don’t deserve it, because I’ve been a pretty good fellow.’ The ‘pretty good’ was a rare understatement coming from Brent, who’s either been the ‘most important bookseller in America,’ as he described himself, or simply Chicago’s most audible, visible and messianic.”
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“His first shop opened in 1946 and was a frequent hangout for the then up and coming Nelson Algren, who had just finished a collection of short stories known as The Neon Wilderness,” Meg writes at The Smallest Color. “Algren’s biographer Bettina Drew describes Brent’s Seven Stairs at that time as ‘a tiny literary bookstore on the Near North Side with a woodstove, a barrel of apples, a hanging salami and a knowledgeable owner . . . ‘”
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“The Neon Wilderness did well in Chicago,” Drew writes in Nelson Algren: A Life On The Wild Side. “Its opening was held at the Seven Stairs, where Stuart Brent had become an important Algren fan. Brent, hoping to propel the store into a literary hotspot, enthusiastically placed the book in his customers’ hands, selling hundreds of copies and holding periodic parties to keep sales alive.”
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“The inimitable Stuart Brent held down the fort for decades further south on Michigan,” Lynn Becker wrote last year at ArchitectureChicago PLUS. “Then Borders opened a superstore in the old Magnin’s department store, and soon the dominoes became to fall.”
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“How do you say goodbye to a legend? Hundreds from the literary world will try Sunday at a farewell party for Stuart Brent, whose fabled Michigan Avenue bookstore closes its doors at the end of this month,” Jeff Lyon wrote in the Tribune in 1996.
“Banners proclaiming a huge going-out-of-business sale mar the shop windows Brent has used for roughly half a century to promulgate his highly idiosyncratic views on the literary and intellectual life.
“Though 80, he’s not stepping down voluntarily. Nor is he going gently into what, to him, is less a good night than some Walpurgisnacht spawned by megabookstores such as Borders and Barnes & Noble that are forcing out ‘personal booksellers’ such as Brent.
“‘Supermarkets,’ he snorts. ‘Philistines. My father used to speak of ‘Men you’d have to stand on tiptoes to talk to.’ Where are those men today?'”
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The opening of the first chaper (“Nobody Came”) of Seven Stairs:
I might as well tell you what this book is about.
Years ago I started to write a memoir about a young man who wanted to be a book dealer and how he made out. I tore it up when I discovered the subject had already been covered by a humorist named Will Cuppy in a book called, How to Become Extinct.
Now I’m not so sure. I’m still around in my middle-aged obsolesence and all about us the young are withering on the vine. Civilization may yet beat me in achieving the state of the dodo. The tragedy is that so few seem to know or really believe it. Maybe there just isn’t enough innocence left to join the howl of the stricken book dealer upon barging into the trap. Not just a howl of self-pity, but the yap of the human spirit determined to assert itself no matter what. There’s some juice in that spirit yet, or there would be no point in submitting the following pages as supporting evidence – hopefully, or bitterly, or both.
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Comments welcome.
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1. From Stephen R.:
The great thinkers and readers, such as Brent, are not extinct (yet). Their gathering places are undistinguishable from the other lonely spots that coffee houses, web sites and small print publishers sporadicly deliver.
My question – are these folks to be found only online now as they try to self-publish onto an iPad and Kindle? Really, I would love some thoughts on the topic.
Posted on June 28, 2010