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nside an inconspicuous lobby in an office building on Walnut Street, there is a small express elevator with only one button to press: Floor 11. Hit the button, and 23.5 seconds later the doors open onto a mezzanine that should be grey offices, the drab trappings of corporate downtown life; but instead, you’re greeted with a beautiful tiled floor showered in warm light from a chandelier above, and Carlo Ponti’s gigantic Ruins of Rome photography. And then, to the right, impossibly and inexplicably, there it is: The Mercantile Library.
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It’s 9 a.m., and the downtown member’s library feels like a library at, well, 9 a.m. Stillness. The sun warms the maple hardwood floors through the Mercantile’s soaring windows. The city hums faintly outside. The streetcar’s bell tolls as it sails along Main Street. The first thing one sees upon entering the library is an 8-foot-tall imposing yet graceful marble statue, acquired in 1856; a fi nger to her lips, she eponymously reminds us of the most traditional tenet of a library: “Silence.” Mercantile Collector/Librarian Cedric Rose and I break that commandment. After we ascend a cast-iron spiral staircase to the library’s 12th-floor lecture room, I ask him what he thinks the public’s perception of the Merc is. “I think that’s one of the main challenges of this place,” he says after a pause. “You have this archaic name — ‘Mercantile Library.’ We get a lot of people who are like, ‘Oh, are you guys a business library?’ “We have a few business books… from 1957,” he says with a laugh. The Young Men’s Mercantile Library Association was founded on April 18, 1835 —almost 20 years before the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County. A group of 45 working-class merchants got together in a fi rehouse and decided to pool their funds so they could buy books and thus improve their knowledge, network and telegraph to the public that they were part of an esteemed organization that was reading instead of downstairs at a bar or brothel. “Back in 1835 when this was a frontier city, people really understood that by educating yourself, you might be able to climb the social and economic ladders,” Rose says. The library’s fi rst incarnation in downtown’s Cincinnati College building was destroyed by a fi re. The building’s owners didn’t have enough funds to rebuild — until the Mercantile’s members raised $10,000, which they pledged to the effort in exchange for a 10,000-year rent-free lease (with the option to renew, naturally), famously drawn up by Alphonso Taft, father to William Howard Taft. The second incarnation partially burned, and the Beaux-Arts building on the current site at 414 Walnut St. was eventually completed in 1904. Today, only a handful of membership libraries still exist — and the Mercantile
12 hours at The Mercantile Library, Cincinnati’s own Room of Requirement
Historic photo of Mercantile members PHOTO: HAILEY BOLLINGER
agical Realism By Zachary Petit
owes its nearly 200-year run in large part to that lease, Rose says. In the lecture room, 22 names of legendary authors who have spoken at the library encircle the ceiling. Over the years the library has hosted Saul Bellow, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Bradbury, Tom Wolfe, Julia Child, Joyce Carol Oates, Salman Rushdie, John Updike, Elmore Leonard, even Herman Melville — whose talk in 1858 on “statuary in Rome” didn’t exactly garner rave reviews (newspapers at the time dubbed it “earnest, though not sufficiently animated for a Western audience”). That’s the library’s past in a nutshell — a story so great that it’s easy to make it the only thing one talks about when discussing the Mercantile. But to do so robs you of the present, and perhaps even the library’s future. Rose has been at the Merc for about 12 years, as has his colleague, Business and
Membership Manager Chris Messick. And over those 12 years, Rose says, a lot has changed — notably the library’s perceived degree of Old Cincinnati exclusivity, which it has pivoted completely away from. Gone are the days when an unknown visitor would be regarded with suspicion, and perhaps even hostility. In fact, anyone can enter and read or look around for free. You only need an annual membership of $55 to check books out. (And there are more than 80,000 of them to choose from.) Moreover, the library has grown into a full-blown literary center. In addition to the authors they bring in for lectures, they host myriad events, books and even have yoga on Saturday mornings. Rose also bucks any notions of elitism. Noting that he comes from a background of working at coffee shops, he focuses on building personal connections with patrons. His day job has evolved from one of scanning old texts and sending them
across the world to having conversations with members and getting to know their personal tastes, so that when they walk into the library, he can give them a tailored recommendation. “For me, it’s customer service,” he says. “You want people to come here. You want them to fi nd what they expect to fi nd, you want them to have the excitement of fi nding what they don’t expect to find and, bottom line, you want people to use the collection and read the books. By any means necessary.” By 11 a.m., more people have shown up. Some browse the long mahogany magazine stands, showcasing copies of Outside, Smithsonian, Wired, Vanity Fair Fair, literary journals. Some sit around reading. A renowned micologist (one who studies fungi) works away at his laptop.