The long history of Milwaukee’s Renaissance Books begins another chapter with a new store in Southridge Mall. Located on the second floor, in a space that once was home to Toys “R” Us, the new store—unlike its famed original Downtown location—is well organized, taking advantage of the open space. Shelves line the perimeter walls and are also set up around the interior of the store.
Owned by longtime Milwaukee book dealer Robert John, Renaissance’s old four-story site (830 and 834 N. Plankinton Ave.) was filled to the rafters with used books. Surprises lurked at every turn. It was closed by the city of Milwaukee in 2011 and sold in 2016 to developer Tim Gokhman. Renaissance opened a neatly-arranged location at General Mitchell International Airport in 1979 and became so heralded by air travelers that it was written about in The New York Times.
In 2012, John’s nephew Christopher John and his wife Cari opened a Renaissance Books in the Shops of Grand Avenue. According to Cari, “as traffic volume at Grand Avenue decreased and more storefronts became vacant, we wondered what our fate would be.” She said they were contacted by Southridge management and instead of down-sizing, the move to Southridge gave Robert John the opportunity to preserve a multi-location business model.
Living for Books
In June of 1978, Michael “Orange Mike” Lowrey “wandered into the old Renaissance store downtown and [has] never successfully gotten out.” Within a year or two, his wife C. Kay Hinchcliffe began working there as well. They live in a house they bought from Robert John’s brother, George John, who co-founded Renaissance with Erwin Just. According to Lowrey, George John was “the last American poet endorsed by Gertrude Stein. Unfortunately, as a businessman, he was a great poet.”
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Lowrey and Hinchcliffe’s daughter Ink began coming into the Mitchell Airport branch when she was 19 days old. “I’ve been working there officially since I was 16.” Ink will manage the Southridge store. “Even though it is located close to two other book stores [both Barnes & Noble and Half Price Books are nearby], I’m hoping we will be able to offer a different sort of experience,” Ink says.
According to Lowrey, there is a philosophy for a good store that goes beyond “skimming the gravy” with hot sellers. When the window of opportunity closes, a bookstore does not want to have stock on hand once a fad is over. “The ideal is to have the depth of collection,” he says, “where you have titles in stock that are referenced in the book you are currently reading, and then have the titles that are referenced in that book. There are books on the shelves from 1763 and you probably would not sell two copies of that in the next year. Yet, all literature is an ongoing conversation.”
Depth of knowledge by the staff is also important. “When you walk up to the counter the person you talk to will be there because they love books, or they wouldn’t be in the room,” he says. Ink expects the Southridge location to offer a comparable size of selection as the airport store and plans to have five employees. She is modeling the store on the way the airport store is run with the deeply organized feel of the Grand Avenue store.
Who buys books anymore? According to Lowrey, you cannot make assumptions. “There was a customer who was pretty clearly a street person who would come in every month or two and buy a Shakespeare play in paperback. Whatever else was going on in his life, that part of his intellect was still being stimulated,” he says. The last time jazz singer Tony Bennett was in town, he purchased The Poetical Works of William Blake. U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist “unsurprisingly bought a lot of U.S. history and law.”
