We had a small sense of what to expect before entering Friday, we had high hopes that we would walk out happy, and we were certainly not disappointed. Our first (very successful) stop was paperback fiction (which Deborah covers here), and after that, it was upstairs to the hardcover fiction.
A quick note about going upstairs: it was about 85 degrees in Cincinnati on Friday, and the floors above the main floor were where Ohio Book Store's AC didn't exist. We were headed to the third floor, so we were warned about what to expect. In short, it was pretty hot.
Deborah aptly likened what we found on the third floor to visiting the stacks in a university library. Just one giant, open floor with rows and rows of bookshelves stocked with books. The third floor wasn't only fiction, but it made up at least half of what we saw before us.
As we often do when we find large sections like this, we split up and each started from one end of the alphabet. I took Z, and as I worked my way backward, I collected:
- two Thornton Wilder works -- The Bridge of San Luis Rey (a personal favorite, and an edition published in the same year it won the Pulitzer Prize, 1928) and The Ides of March (on our to-read lists, this edition published in its original year of publication, 1948, as a "Book-of-the-Month Club" selection);
- Main Street by Sinclair Lewis, published in 1921, the year after its original publication, and the year in which Lewis was initially awarded the Pulitzer, though the award was later given to Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence;
- A Modern Library edition of Six Modern American Plays. Eugene O'Neill's "The Emperor Jones"; Matthew Anderson's "Winterset"; George Kaufman and Moss Hart's "The Man Who Came To Dinner"; Lillian Hellman's "The Little Foxes"; Tennessee Williams' "The Glass Menagerie"; and Thomas Heggen and Joshua Logan's "Mister Roberts" comprised the collection published in 1951.
The work I added to our collection was Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev. True, it is a book we already own (and it's a book I am currently reading). But this was a slipcase, Heritage Press edition (published in 1942) of Turgenev's novel illustrated by Fritz Eichenberg, whom we have come to appreciate via the work he did on copies we have of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. So now that we are on the lookout for Eichenberg-illustrated editions, this was one we had to have.
Fathers and sons is also an extremely important theme at Ohio Book Store, as it is run by James Fallon and his two sons, Mike and Jim. We had an opportunity to talk quite a bit with James and Mike (we also met Jim at the end of the day when we helped close the place down), and the Fallons are incredibly nice and welcoming people who really seem to love what they do. And since we love what they do, we were honored to meet them and be in their book store, even if only for an hour or so.
We'll spend a good deal of time on Get a Spine talking about the present and future of used-book stores, and this was one visit that left us extremely upbeat about the future. The eldest Fallon has been in the book business since he was in middle school, when he first started working at Ohio Book Store, and he bought the business in 1971. His sons both work there, too, and in addition to being booksellers, they run the store's book-binding operation.
We're not sure if the Fallon brothers have families and children of their own, but we get the feeling that if they do, the Ohio Book Store is one used-book store that we can count on being around for as long as we are. And that feeling makes us very happy.
Books added: Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev; The Bridge of San Luis Rey and The Ides of March by Thornton Wilder; Main Street by Sinclair Lewis; Six Modern American Plays, intro by Allan G. Halline
Publishers (in same order): Heritage Press; Grosset & Dunlap; Harper & Brothers; Harcourt, Brace and Company; Random House, Modern Library
Years: 1942; 1928; 1948; 1921; 1951
Where obtained: Ohio Book Store, Cincinnati, Ohio.
Price: $30.50 for the five
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