Ohio Bookstore
For more than two years, Cincinnati has been something of a second home to me.
I know the city with an intimacy previously reserved for places I’ve lived. One borne, in this case, from the city being a hub of marketing research and the headquarters of my largest client.
Cincinnati bears all the hallmarks of settled-in familiarity. I have tried-and-true restaurants I return to again and again, plus an ever-expanding set of spots on my to-visit list. I have a go-to running route – up through OTR, down to the water, and back again. I have different hair products and allergy pills on-hand to combat the city’s humidity and pollen. And, at the 21C – where I spent nearly 100 nights in 2016 – I have a favorite receptionist, a favorite floor, and a favorite room service meal. But what I didn’t have, until recently, was a favorite bookstore.
That all changed last month with a visit to Ohio Bookstore, a 75-year-old, five-story wonderland of used books, magazines, and Cincinnati-themed ephemera. The store is a study in contrasts. On one hand, it’s a shop of soaring ceilings, cheerful staffers, and bright colors. A place where help is quickly offered, where entire walls are color-blocked with the spines of decades-old National Geographic issues, and where book restorers hum along to the rhythm of whirring machines as they emboss gold leaf onto leather. On the other hand, it can feel like a sinister place – teeming with dusty alcoves, musty stairwells, hoarder’s den vibes, and all-but-abandoned top floors where the only lights are on comically delayed timers. Ohio Bookstore is a changeling, the Bradbury Building of bookstores. It’s a strange place in any context; in this city where most book sellers are suburban and corporate, it’s almost unimaginably so.
Like Collector’s Treasury in Joburg and Moe’s Books in Berkeley, Ohio Bookstore is a place meant to get lost in. Here, bestsellers take a backseat to the rare, obscure, and random. I pored over a section of first-edition presidential biographies, stumbled upon boxes of computer science textbooks from the 70s, and spotted a cache of Ty’s Tricks, an almost comically campy renovation and repair book by erstwhile home improvement heartthrob Ty Pennington.
Each of Ohio Bookstore’s five floors holds weird and wonderful surprises - tables covered in unstable stacks of $1 books, whole volumes of medical encyclopedias, and shelves devoted to subjects as varied as medieval French history, the occult, and books on books (my favorite). I climbed ladders to nowhere, played “store” on disused cash registers, and stared out massive windows so old that the glass is wavy. What I didn’t do, interestingly, was leave with much – I grew overwhelmed by the ‘needle in a haystack’ task of finding the right book for me and ended up just randomly grabbing a beautifully-bound copy of David Copperfield from the store’s window display and buying that. So if you do head to Ohio Bookstore, come with a plan – a book to bind, a rare item to hunt down, or a few hours to spend separating wheat from chaff. I promise you’ll love it.
