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, The Dial, whose offices were located on the same floor. At the time, the Fine Arts Building was the center of Chicago arts and culture. Constructed by the Studebaker Company in 1885 to showcase their horse-drawn carriages, the colorful Romanesque building was remodeled a few years later to gather “the artistic, social, and literary concerns of the city into a single building.”

By 1901, it was home to artist studios, theater companies, literary clubs, and more than ten thousand music students. A decade later, it gave birth to Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine, Margaret Anderson’s The Little Review, and the Chicago Little Theatre. With thousands of booklovers moving up and down the stairwells every day, a seventh-floor bookstore didn’t seem like such a terrible idea. “All Chicago society came to Browne’s Bookstore,” Anderson writes. “Here tea was served and everyone was very smart.”

Of course, the store’s altitude wasn’t the only reason it gained national attention: every inch of the interior was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright—the shelves, the windows, even the knickknacks.  Read More