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Our City's Forbears, What Were They Reading?

In 1841, the year of our earliest roots, when A. D. Lundy opened his store in Market Square, at 24 East 3rd St, several new publications would tempt the reading palate of local citizens and visitors just off the canal boats that traveled up from Harrisburg. As they stretched their legs at the Market Street wharf, they might have walked the short distance to Lundy’s business to fetch the first edition, hot off the press, of The Deerslayer by James Fenimore Cooper or Edgar Allan Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue. Could Charles Dickens, who toured this part of Pennsylvania by canal boat have dropped in to view his brand new book, Barnaby Rudge?

In 1867 when Lundy expanded to 26 and 28 East 3rd, he took in a partner, J.J. Ayers and changed the name to Ayers and Lundy. The Ulman Opera House was constructed in the same "Square" that year and two years later, Mark Twain lectured there. Did he cross the square to see his book The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Stories which had been published in 1867?

In 1873, when John M. Dean joined the firm, they were selling the new book by Jules Verne, Around the World in Eighty Days and Ambrose Bierce’s Fiend’s Delight. In 1874, when John Dean opened a separate store across the Square at 12 W. 3rd St., Peter Herdic was busy building homes, churches and a hotel a half mile away from the center of town and he invented a horse-drawn taxi called a Herdic cab to get him there. If he could find the time, he might have bought and read the new book, Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy (one of the few novels by that author that has a happy ending).

In 1893, John Dean moved his business to 232 W. 4th St. and sold the wives of the millionaires Stephen Crane’s first novel Maggie: a Girl of the Streets and Oscar Wilde’s new play A Woman of No Importance.

In 1905 when 18 year old Jack Roesgen began his bookselling career as a clerk in what was now called The Loan Book Shop or The H. L. Otto Bookstore, still at 232 West 4th St., he would have sold G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy—a book and author for which he held a life-long appreciation. For the lucky children he recommended the new Frances Hodgson Burnett novel, The Little Princess or the Jack London tale, White Fang.

In 1916, the owners moved the bookstore back to Market Square (16 W. 3rd) and appointed Roesgen manager. His window displays would include the new books: Chicago Poems by Carl Sandberg, Mysterious Stranger, by Mark Twain, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, You Know Me by Ring Lardner and the spanking new philosophy in Albert Einstein’s book, Relativity.

In 1929, when the H. Y. Otto Bookstore was moved a few doors up to 26 W. 3rd, Roesgen was happy to recommend the new books including Chesterton’s Everlasting Man, Ernest Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Virginia Woolf’s Room of One’s Own and the very popular religious classic by Lloyd C. Douglas, The Magnificent Obsession.

In 1934, Roesgen bought the store which was now at 137 W. 4th Street, and he was selling Williamsport’s movers and shakers Call It Sleep by Henry Roth, Appointment in Samarra by John O’Hara, Lust for Life by Irving Stone, Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie and Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

In 1940 Roesgen moved his store to 232 W. 4th St., the location where he was first introduced to bookselling 35 years before. Best sellers that year included Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers and Native Son by Richard Wright. Two children’s books introduced that year have remained consistent best sellers for the next (could it be?) 66 years—Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hatches the Egg and Dorothy Kunhardt’s Pat the Bunny.

Our founding fathers and mothers don’t seem nearly as remote when you know you can read the same books they did. Drop in any time and see (amazingly!) how many of these books are still in print.