A shelf organized around place
A local-history shelf could begin with a familiar neighborhood and lead toward the larger city. A walking history, a reference work and a social study each offered a different route. One organized attention around places; another brought together historical subjects; a third followed the lives and institutions of a community.
The three books considered here were contextual reading about Chicago. They represented approaches to the city’s history rather than a list of Reading on Walden’s stock. Their connection with the bookstore’s story lay in the interest in place expressed by its own Local Interest section.
Chicago: City of Neighborhoods
Dominic Pacyga and Ellen Skerrett · 1986
Chicago: City of Neighborhoods approached the city through neighborhood histories and walking tours. People, institutions, buildings and monuments helped give each area its story. The book’s organizing idea treated Chicago as a collection of places with particular histories as well as a city considered as a whole.
That neighborhood scale supplied one way of thinking about a bookstore’s setting. Reading on Walden belonged to Beverly Hills and Morgan Park, and its site gave the surrounding shopping district a section of its own. A history organized around neighborhoods offered a related scale of attention: the city encountered through a smaller place within it.
The Encyclopedia of Chicago
Edited by James R. Grossman, Ann Durkin Keating and Janice L. Reiff · 2004
The Encyclopedia of Chicago supplied a historical reference approach to the city. Its format differed from a continuous narrative. A subject could be approached on its own, then placed beside another part of Chicago’s history. Reference reading made room for a specific question as well as for a wider survey.
On a local-history shelf, an encyclopedia served a different purpose from a walking history. The neighborhood book began with place and movement through it. The reference work offered another arrangement of the city’s past. Together, those forms suggested how one subject could be examined through more than one kind of book.
Black Metropolis
St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton · First published in 1945
Black Metropolis was a historical and sociological account of Black life on Chicago’s South Side. It examined migration, settlement and community life, including the institutions through which people shaped their lives in the city. Its scope brought social history into a shelf concerned with Chicago’s places.
The book’s focus supplied a reminder of the different scales within the phrase South Side. The wider South Side included communities with their own histories and experiences. Reading on Walden’s Beverly and Morgan Park setting belonged within that larger geography; a study of the city’s social life brought other questions and perspectives into view.
From books to neighborhood history
The Ridge Historical Society’s attention to the history of Beverly Hills, Morgan Park and nearby communities provided a local counterpart to citywide reading. Its written, visual and oral material reflected several ways a place’s past had been recorded and understood.
The neighborhood page followed the Ridge and the setting around Reading on Walden. The Local Interest page returned to the store’s own sections and recommendations. The books here supplied a wider Chicago context for that interest in the relationship between reading and place.