The Brick Row Book Shop Centenary

SAN FRANCISCO—On the eve of its centenary, the Brick Row Book Shop of San Francisco is the primary contender for oldest bookstore in the United States. The elegantly appointed shop in Union Square was first established in New Haven in December 1915, with additional branches springing up in Princeton and New York City after initial commercial success. The Independent called Brick Row “one of the most original and inviting antiquarian bookshops in America.” Early clients included William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote to his friend Edmund Wilson in 1922, “I have Ulysses from the Brick Row Book Shop…there is something about middle-class Ireland that depresses me inordinately.”  

The story of The Brick Row Book Shop—which flourished continuously in five American cities before settling in San Francisco—is also the story of its owners, a series of slightly eccentric, ferociously well-read (and sometimes ferocious) gentlemen.  The first was Edmond Byrne Hackett, a schoolmate of James Joyce who later introduced Joyce to his American editor. Hackett worked at Doubleday before becoming the first director of the Yale University Press.  An irascible man from a good family (his brother was one of the first literary editors of The New Republic) Hackett opened his New Haven shop during a moment of Jazz Age excess after the first World War; an early Publishers Weekly account lauded Hackett’s “original strategy of reaching the young men of Yale, Columbia, and Princeton.”  As his successor, the equally memorable Franklin Gilliam revealed, Hackett “was asked to leave one of those places…because of his technique of getting the youngsters to buy expensive books and then suing the parents for payment.” But Hackett was also a genuine man of letters, using his position to publish original books, including a 1922 collection of Herman Melville writings that helped to pique interest in the mostly forgotten author.