When Frank Lloyd Wright Designed a Bookstore

Frank Lloyd Wright. Photo: Yousuf Karsh.

In October 1907—a few months after Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle horrified Chicago—a new bookstore opened on the seventh floor of the Fine Arts Building downtown. In her autobiography, Margaret Anderson, the founder and editor of The Little Review, called it “the most beautiful bookshop in the world.” But Browne’s Bookstore survived for only five years. In 1908, a visiting Publishers Weekly reporter may have hit upon why: “Thus far, only one dealer in all classes of books has had the courage to locate his store up ‘in the air.’ ”

“The air” was the seventh floor. The lone dealer was Francis Fisher Browne, the editor of Chicago’s literary magazine du jour, , whose offices were located on the same floor. At the time, the