So, thanks to Janice (and also Doug) for sharing the news from Milwaukee that the city's years-long struggle to condemn the legendary Renaissance Books has finally succeeded.
http://www.jsonline.com/news/milwaukee/city-moves-to-demolish-renaissance-book-shop-building-b99621709z1-353064321.html
This is sad news, since that's long been a Milwaukee landmark and was the last of the old, run-down, over-stuffed, jumbled bookstores that downtown Milwaukee was well-stocked with when I first moved up there. Renaissance Books, in an old warehouse alongside the river, was four floors of shelves with books everywhere, many of them decades old. Here's where I stocked up on misc. volumes of James Branch Cabell and filled out my working library of Dunsany books from the library discards on their shelves (the latter appeared a few days after a library sale in which they'd snatched them up for a nickel a volume at the very start of the library sale, then offered them for sale the next week at $10). They also had a smallish area of records, at which I got one or two albums (I think the two Danny Kirwan's solo albums I have came from here).
All this was great, but leaves out the other side: that the building was basically derelict. "Ramshackle" barely begins to describe it: leaning walls, sagging staircases where the steps were only attached on one side, having come off the other; cracks in the wall, floors that tilted. In its latter days, things got worse: books spilling off shelves to lie scattered on the floor and I think they put the top floor off-limits as too unsafe to walk across.
And then there was their bizarre policy of not putting prices in books. Instead, they'd make up a price when you brought the book up to check-out. You'd hand them whatever book(s) you wanted to buy, and they'd glance them over, size you up, and come up with a price. Sometimes it sound fair and sometimes not; I put a lot of books I wanted back because I thought they were asking too much. The whole practice might have fitted in well in a Moroccan market, but I found it endlessly annoying in a Milwaukee bookshop.
All of which made it all the more amazing when Renaissance opened up a branch in the Milwaukee airport (Mitchell Field). It was full of interesting books, like the motherstore, but here they were well-organized, well-shelved, and priced, all in a clean and well-lit room. It quickly became my favorite airport bookstore anywhere, bar none: I stop in there every chance I get when passing to or through Milwaukee.
So, I guess the cry shd be: Renaissance Books is dead; long live Renaissance Books.
But I do hate the thought of all those old books being bulldozed and ending up in a landfill.
--John R.
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2 comments:
I visited that atmospheric downtown store just once, on 28 Nov. 1987, where I found a couple of Everyman's Library editions of books by George Borrow and an edition of the Letters of Cowper, which CSL praises somewhere. I think I ordered some books from them later, too. I remember a window in the rear of the store that opened right over the river, seeming a convenient place to dump a body if need be. There must be few such sprawling stores left in the U. S.
Alas, most of the books were allowed to die of neglect and leaky roof, before the old building was demolished and their corpses discarded. I will only be bitter for the next sixty or seventy years about that horror.
The city engineers showed up with cops, chased us out, and never allowed us to return, leaving behind first editions and artwork and business records and equipment (fine old book presses, for example) and personal effects. They boarded it up, and took steps to ensure we couldn't sneak in on any rescue missions.
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