Stuart Brent, legendary bookseller in Chicago, died last week at the age of 98. He founded his first bookstore in 1946 "with the help of a $300 GI loan," the Chicago Tribune noted. A few years later, he opened Stuart Brent Books, which became a Chicago institution and closed in 1996.
The Chicago blog of the University of Chicago Press called Brent "a bookseller of the most independent sort: well-read, opinionated, and willing (or more) to shape his customers' reading habits. Over the course of his fifty years in the business, bookselling became ever more concentrated in the mall stores, superstores, and virtual stores of billion dollar corporations. The books stocked in Stuart Brent Books were chosen by a personality, not an algorithm."
"He was proud of his roots on the city's old West Side, where his Ukrainian parents taught Mr. Brent--then called Samuel Brodsky--folk tales, stories of shtetl life, and intellectual debate," the Chicago Sun-Times wrote. "Mr. Brent's love of reading came from his father, who devoured Joseph Conrad, Mark Twain and Yiddish authors."
In 1974, Sun-Times writer Tom Fitzpatrick wrote that entering Stuart Brent Books was "like walking into a whirlwind. Brent is a man of moods, of violent enthusiasms and equally violent aversions. He is a man who will not keep his opinions to himself.... a gadfly who demands the best from himself and everyone around him."
Brent had a TV show and also wrote a memoir, Seven Stairs, named after his first bookstore. In a foreword for Seven Stairs, Saul Bellow wrote: "Stuart Brent is the Orpheus of Chicago booksellers, ready to challenge hell itself to bring a beautiful book back to Chicago and the light of its reading lamps."
