Ask Steven Morvay what he thinks about Chicago and he minces no words. Morvay, senior vice president of marketing for Waldenbooks, calls Chicago a “murderous market.”
The last few years have seen increasingly fierce competition among the major bookstore chains in Chicago. Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Borders, Coopersmith’s–if you can name the chain, you can find one of its stores here. Or, more likely, a few of its stores. Many of these stores have just arrived on the scene within the past few years. The city’s high volume of book purchases, coupled with the fact that for years the Chicago market was dominated by one chain, Kroch’s and Brentano’s, may be what’s attracting national companies wanting to get a foothold in the midwest. Meanwhile the independents are dug in, ready to fight for their turf.
What’s so attractive about the Chicago market? For starters, its size. “This is a major market because it’s a major center of population,” says Dan Mayer, manager of the Waldenbooks at 127 W. Madison.
Kroch’s and Brentano’s is the oldest and most seasoned contender in the current battle. The chain traces its history to 1907, when Adolph Kroch opened a small German-language bookstore at 26 W. Monroe. Shortly after he opened he was offered a shipment of English-language books at a substantial discount. When those books sold out within days for a handsome profit, Kroch realized he’d tapped a much wider market.
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Kroch seemed to have a gift for the business. As Ben Hecht recounts in his autobiography, A Child of the Century, “This merchant of Monroe Street didn’t sell me books. Rather, he waved a wand and the wonders of de Gourmont, Huysmans, Strindberg and Proust sprang into being.” The bookseller became known as “Papa Kroch,” and his store became a gathering spot for literary figures of the day. Hecht, Ernest Hemingway, Carl Sandburg, and Thornton Wilder were frequent visitors and close friends with Kroch.
By the 1960s, two bookstore chains had discovered that shopping malls, with their heavy traffic, provided the perfect vehicle for selling books on a national scale. Headquartered in Connecticut, Waldenbooks began expanding into east-coast shopping centers. B. Dalton, owned by the Dayton-Hudson department stores headquartered in Minneapolis, started moving west. Within a few years, each chain had stores numbering in the hundreds. It was inevitable their growth would bring them face to face in Chicago.
Barbara’s Bookstore was a single storefront on Wells 30 years ago; now there are five Barbara’s Bookstores, in Old Town, Lakeview, the Clybourn corridor, Oak Park, and the west Loop. Anderson’s began as the book department in a Naperville pharmacy. Soon what started as an upstairs room was remodeled into a small bookstore. Today the independent chain has stores in Naperville, Downers Grove, and Elmhurst.
