Loganberry Books

Little more than a lake separates Cleveland from my hometown in Southern Ontario – so close that our Canadian TVs picked up the city’s cable channels. As a result, my childhood was spent yearning for activities a country away – for the Great Lakes Science Center, for the Cleveland Zoo, and for the coasters of Cedar Point. My first experience of America wasn’t New York or Los Angeles – it was Cleveland.

Later, in the city's nadir, its industrial exodus and LeBron’s tenure in Miami, the city felt like a punchline. Like many others, I dismissed it as the “mistake on the lake.” But now, in the wake of an NBA championship, Michael Symon’s restaurants, and about a million microbreweries, Cleveland is having a sort of comeback.

For more than 30 years, I’ve been watching this city ebb and flow from afar. At a distance, it feels like a study in contrasts – exodus and renaissance, underdogs and champions, urban blight and tony suburbs. I always saw Cleveland, first and foremost, as a symbol. A parable in the form of a place.

And that characterization – or more accurately, mischaracterization – is why I was so taken aback by my recent trip to the city, and by Loganberry Books in particular. It’s an incredible bookstore – a place that prompted me to write syrupy adjectives such as ‘spirited’ and ‘soulful’ in my notebook without a hint of irony. And it’s a bookstore that resists easy classification. It’s not really a survivor of Cleveland’s darkest days, nor a beacon of hope, nor an emblem of a brighter future, nor any other platitude I tried to pin on it. It’s simply a wonderful shop – a dreamland really – in a place that still needs every wonderful spot it can get.

Loganberry is an amalgam of all the things that make bookstores such a pleasure to visit. It has grandeur – a soaring skylight, whole walls of leather-bound books, and a mansion’s worth of Persian rugs. It has rustic charm – a meandering layout, overstuffed furniture in old-lady prints, and shelves purchased from an old Shaker Heights library, a nearby estate house, and a men's clothing store. And, best of all, it has a ton of whimsy – mismatched dining chairs scattered everywhere, handwritten signs, and room titles such as “The Sanctuary,” where the first-editions and rare books are kept.

Loganberry is named for Harriet Logan, who opened the store in the early 90s and continues to run it today. In addition to selling books, running events, and sitting on the board of Literary Cleveland, Logan is something of a detective. She spends her nights solving literary mysteries through Loganberry’s Stump the Bookseller blog, to which people submit obscure bits of information about books they once loved. For example, Logan once received the clue “It was red, and the girls had pigtails, something about shopping" and deduced that the book in question was an old picture book called "Sally Goes Shopping Alone."

In March, Loganberry made headlines when it turned all of its titles written by men backwards to demonstrate the gender gap in fiction. 10,000 volumes in all were turned page side out, resulting in a sea of white that showed just how dominant men remain in the world of publishing. And while the stunt was new, the sentiment wasn’t – Logan has been highlighting women’s writing in honor of Women’s History Month for the past 20 years.

My trip to Loganberry marked a lot of firsts for me – my first time getting a tour from a friendly staff member, my first encounter with a store cat (he’s named Otis and has his own Twitter profile,) and my first time roping a near-stranger into these bookstore missions. I flew into Cleveland with a colleague – it was his third week at my company and our first business trip together – and took full advantage of his kindness and relative cluelessness by suggesting we stop by Loganberry on our way to a client meeting. We must have been a strange sight: two New Yorkers, one a brazen lady asking a million questions, the other a man looking slightly shell-shocked to find himself in a bookstore instead of a boardroom. But he recovered quickly, and even left with a book of his own! Meanwhile I walked out with a copy of Carmen Marie Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties, plus a slightly more nuanced understanding of Cleveland. Loganberry, I love you.