A Time Machine at Rookwood Commons & Pavilion

A Joseph-Beth Bookstore and a time machine into my past.

Cincinnati has a long history with books.

Before we moved here, I looked up (and read) a number of Cincinnati books on Hoopla, Libby’s less commercially popular and much stranger sibling. One book was Cincinnati's Literary Heritage by Kevin Grace.

I recommend the book, which I won’t recount in detail, but a brief description for those interested:

Since its founding in 1788, Cincinnati has treasured books and reading. While the early settlers swapped books with one another, by the early 1800s, civic leaders were envisioning the creation of a public library; in 1814, the Circulating Library Society was founded. Other libraries followed, as did bookshops and stationers. Soon, printing and publishing made Cincinnati one of America's centers for the book trade. Ault & Wiborg became one of the world's largest manufacturers of printing ink. The Strobridge Lithography Company produced the lion's share of circus and show posters in the Western world. Embracing a city that has welcomed poets and playwrights, authors and booksellers--including a mobile book bus that can pop up anywhere--author Kevin Grace explores the rich heritage of reading and books in Cincinnati.

Basically, one has to envision Cincinnati as the post-colonial era version of Los Angeles. Yes, Saint Louis is “the gateway to the west” but for a period, Cincinnati was the west. At least commercially. So it makes sense that publishers needed a western outpost and Cincinnati would be the logical place for it.

The legacy lasts today in its bookstores and libraries, like the CHPL (Ohio loves and has great libraries), which is the second largest in circulation in America, second only to NYC.

There’s also The Mercantile Library, which I joined at the suggestion of my friend and former colleague Claudia Anderson from my Weekly Standard days. Fittingly, that publication’s editor, and my friend and current colleague Bill Kristol will be speaking there next week. The “Merc”, as it’s known, is undergoing renovations and is slated to open in October. I’m excited to be able to use it as a workspace when I need to get out of the house, but really, I’m a joiner and $60 a year for a members-only library that lets you eat lunch there and has a lot of interesting books—not to mention a kick-ass Libby selection is a steal.

I had to cut short a work trip to Texas due to a family medical emergency, which I won’t elaborate on here, but suffice to say I knew Cincinnati Children’s was the #1 such hospital, was glad to know that it’s here, but had hoped I never needed to find out if that ranking was deserved. It is.

Back early from my work trip with a recovering child, we went on a field trip today to the nearby Columbia Tusculum neighborhood, which is Cincinnati’s oldest. There’s more exploring to be done there, it has an old Carnegie Library (now an event venue), but we were there for flowers. The Eve Floral Company was a treat to visit, though I failed to do my due diligence on the kind of flower shop it was Not your traditional “oh shit I need flowers for _______” shop. It’s more of an experience, and the owner Evelyn was very helpful and kind. Not what I needed today, but will be back.

Eve Floral is in between two other neat shops: The Collective 513, which we popped into and it was definitely a mistake since we were on a mission for flowers. I say a mistake because I got sidetracked and it had so many interesting things. Like this:

Are you wondering: Is that Taylor Swift as ‘The Girl with a Pearl Earring’ by Johannes Vermeer? Yes it is. Except it is not painted by Vermeer, but a local artist. It’s rude to take pictures in a place that sells art, I think, but I did have to take a pic of that one. I know people who might want to buy it.

The other store was Bookery Cincy, an independent bookstore that reminded me of “The Shop Around The Corner” in You’ve Got Mail. Going there was also a mistake, since, again, I was on a mission to buy flowers, and people who know me know that I am not only a Proud Library Person™ as my mom was as grade school librarian, but I am a sucker for bookstores. With a recovering kid, you gotta let them pick something out at a fun bookstore.

Definitely add Bookery to your list in the upcoming inaugural Independent Bookstore crawl next month. It was also a mistake because I knew that later that night (my wife and other daughter being on their own errands), we were going to Rookwood Commons & Pavilion for dinner and to go to Joseph-Beth bookstore.

I picked up What’s Next: A Backstage Pass to the West Wing, Its Cast and Crew, and Its Enduring Legacy of Service by Melissa Fitzgerald and Fmr. Deputy National Security Adviser Kate Harper, er, Mary McCormack. I didn’t know about the book until I saw this touching interview about it recently, and immediately added it to Libby, know it was not a good “Libby Book.” ¹

After a nice family dinner at Buca di Beppo, dusting off an aging gift certificate we hadn’t used since D.C.’s Buca closed last year. That location was not at all convenient, Northwest Washington being very inconvenient for a family in Woodbridge. ²

Joseph-Beth came to Cleveland when I was in high school. They were expanding and at one point had two locations in Northeast Ohio, but I usually only went to the one at Shaker Square, because I’m a Shaker Guy. Legacy Village wasn't my scene (Beachwood Place, however, was).

It was an ambitious location. As Publisher’s Weekly reported at the time:

Joseph-Beth at Shaker Square had struggled for much of its tenure. In the beginning, it encompassed 36,000 square feet of space, including a large children's area and a bistro. Although business was strong the first year, sales dropped and the store shrunk in size. First, the children's wing closed; the music section was the next to go; and the bistro closed down last January. When the store shut its doors for good on Sunday, July 11, it was down to 12,000 square feet of retail space and 12 employees. Most of those employees are being transferred to the 28,500-square-foot Lyndhurst location.

I loved that bookstore. My mom went there constantly. It was founded by a fellow Ignatius grad, Neil Van Uum. The name, "Joseph-Beth" is the middle names of Neil and his then-wife, Mary Beth. Despite being from Cleveland, his business started in Lexington, Kentucky in the mid 1980s. Van Uum was called to the Queen City by the University of Cincinnati, where he attended college.

An interesting 2015 profile of Van Uum in Memphis Magazine has piqued my curiosity to look him up.³

Van Uum didn’t set out from college wanting to run a bookstore. After earning a degree in business marketing from the University of Cincinnati, he was hired by FMC Corporation selling raw-material chemicals in bulk loads. “It was a great job,” says Van Uum, who headed a territory that included Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, and West Tennessee. 

Joseph-Beth was a fun place to stop on the RTA on the way home from school. What parent is going to get mad at a later-than-usual arrival when you say “I stopped at the bookstore?” I did more than that, to be sure, and this was before the digital receipts could incriminate, but we stopped there from time to time on the way home. A lot of positive memories.

It had that classic bookstore smell, it was roomy, multi-floored, very wooden, and full of interesting trinkets.

An old file photo of the Shaker Square Joseph-Beth.

Shaker Square, despite its name, is actually in the city of Cleveland. And Shaker Heights, being many things, is not known for commerce, because commerce brings other people and that is something Shaker does not want. Apparently going to the City of Cleveland wasn’t something Shakerites wanted to do much of either, as business quickly declined, and it wasn’t due to anything Joseph-Beth did. Perhaps a young Jeff Bezos played a role, but Shaker Square should have worked for them. It didn’t. It lasted four years.

After it closed, it became… a weird looking CVS.

And a historical spot, no less, as it previously hosted the first suburban Stouffer’s restaurant, which gave birth to the now-Nestlé-owned (and Solon, Ohio-based) frozen food conglomerate you know and love.

When Legacy Village closed, I remember going to to the liquidation sale, where I got a copy of Idiocracy, which sat shrink wrapped and unwatched in my DVD collection for years. Funny/sad how that turned out to be a documentary that was largely unwatched and ignored when it came out.

Van Uum’s Joseph-Beth had its loans called in and filed for bankruptcy in 2011. PW reported at the time:

The ensuing bankruptcy has since wound down, but only after three of the six JoBeth stores closed—Charlotte, N.C.; Pittsburgh, Pa.; and Cleveland, Ohio—and the Davis-Kidd store in Nashville. Van Uum lost both the Joseph-Beth and Davis-Kidd names along with the Lexington and Cincinnati stores and a health clinic in Cleveland to his former landlord, Robert Langley, in auction; a fourth store in Virginia went to Books-A-Million.

An excerpt from Memphis Magazine tells a little about the bankruptcy:

[T]he only person bidding against Van Uum was Robert Langley, his former landlord in Lexington. Without going into detail about why Langley would oppose him, Van Uum says, “Some people think anything goes in the world of business. I spent eight hours bidding for my company, trying to keep it, and this guy just keeps bidding me up. [It’s hard] when you have a company you’ve built for 25 years, bring it through months of a reorganization, and watch it ripped from you in a single day.”

He was able to salvage one location, though he lost the name:

Van Uum went into the auction for Joseph-Beth only believing he would get back some of his stores, including the Memphis store. After the auction, he purchased the Memphis store with the assistance of Tom Prewitt, landlord of Laurelwood Shopping Center, from Gordon Brothers, who bid to liquidate it. “I couldn’t abide the situation, so I bought it,” he says. “There was no way to save the Nashville store. That was one of my regrets. My number one goal was to see the company and the stores survive. Obviously Joseph-Beth continues on, and I’m happy about that.”

Ultimately, the Memphis store died off, killed by online sales. The community eventually demanded another local bookseller, enter Novel Memphis.

Two traditional Joseph-Beth locations exist today: Rookwood and Lexington, KY. Another hospital-sized store exists at the Cleveland Clinic. Its corporate headquarters? Here in Mount Washington, down near Lunken Airport.

After losing Joseph-Beth, Van Uum told PW:

“Do I wish I still had all those stores? No,” says Van Uum. “The trajectory of the book business is scary. At my core, I’m an entrepreneur. I love the challenges of being involved in the book business. But I fear for the large stores. The Joseph-Beth stores were 30,000 to 40,000 square feet. The store in Memphis is a little smaller, it’s 22,000.”

Van Uum tried a few more times. Downtown in Cincinnati in 2013, he opened the The Booksellers on Fountain Square, which was smaller, and sounds a lot like the J-B model.

The 6,500-square-foot store has a café and offers books, games, Rookwood Pottery, Spartina bags and scarves, Thymes Fragrances, Lilly Pullitzer, Jonathan Adler, Crane Stationery, Charlie Harper gift items, Natural Life, Baggallini, Cincy T-shirts, gifts, toys and more.

Due to its location and decline in retail, particularly the closure of a Macy’s, a landlord dispute ensued. It closed in 2019.

In Miami Township, he opened The Booksellers at Austin Landing in 2015, but that closed about two years later. Van Uum told Memphis:

Four years after the bankruptcy debacle, the 56-year-old bibliophile identifies himself as “president, CEO, and debtor” then adds with a laugh, “actually debtor ought to come first.”

I get the sense Van Uum is a charming guy, but then again, aren’t all Ignatius grads, in addition to our noted humility? I do wonder what he’s up to now.

I wasn’t sure what to expect going to Joseph-Beth. It was like dipping oneself in magic waters and being transported 20 years into the past. Like a literal time machine. And my girls loved it.

Design elements, quirks, signage… heck: Brontë bistro. Van Uum’s creation, though with a different owner, still lives on.

I had a nice conversation with Priscilla, one of the booksellers, but spared her most (but not all) of these details as I soaked it in.

Of course, being a joiner, my late mother would have wanted me to join the rewards program, which Priscilla warned me, costs. $10 or $25.

Priscilla asked me which of the charities I wanted my contribution to go to, as the contribution you make is directed towards one of a few charities. The NPR classical station, the NPR spoken station, which I was about to pick until she said Children’s.

Obviously had to go with Children’s, given the whirlwind couple days spent there. The care was great, so I told her that’s where I wanted my contribution to go.

The profile on Van Uum in Memphis concludes with this great kicker:

“When people ask how I get through difficult times, I could lie and say I’m just tougher than everybody. But I think it’s my faith,” says Van Uum. “That faith tells me I’m doing the work I’m supposed to be doing. Life is out to get you, nobody gets out alive,” he says, smiling at that old joke. “But God gives us gifts. It’s up to us to accept them and to keep moving forward.

“I’m probably gonna die at my old bookshelf, fall over when I’m 80 or something,” he concludes with a laugh. “But that’s okay. What have I got to feel bad about?”

As much as things change, and while it’s not owned anymore by my fellow Wildcat Van Uum, I’m happy to live near a literal time machine, at least one that works, if only for me.

And for that, I have Neil Van Uum to thank.

1. By that, I mean it’s too long, has too many formatting oddities, images, etc. where the digital reading experience is not optimal. It’s better to physically read the book, either purchased or borrowed.

2. Fun Fact: When I worked for the RNC in 2004, I went to dinner there with a few people whose last names you might now recognize: Cuccinelli and Sekulow. Different times.

3. He still lives in the area, I see, and I am going to reach out to see if he’d chat. If he does, watch this space!