The Caxton Club

Despite its rough-and-tumble image, Chicago has long been identified as a city where books take center stage. In fact, a volume by A. J. Liebling gave the Second City its nickname. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle arose from the midwestern capital’s most infamous industry. The great Chicago Fire led to the founding of the Chicago Public Library. The city has fostered writers such as Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow, and Gwendolyn Brooks. Chicago’s literary magazines The Little Review and Poetry introduced the world to Eliot, Hemingway, Joyce, and Pound. The city’s robust commercial printing industry supported a flourishing culture of the book. With this beautifully produced collection, Chicago’s rich literary tradition finally gets its due. Chicago by the Book profiles 101 landmark publications about Chicago from the past 170 years that have helped define the city and its image. Each title—carefully selected by the Caxton Club, a venerable Chicago bibliophilic organization—is the focus of an illustrated essay by a leading scholar, writer, or bibliophile. Arranged chronologically to show the history of both the city and its books, the essays can be read in order from Mrs. John H. Kinzie’s 1844 Narrative of the Massacre of Chicago to Sara Paretsky’s 2015 crime novel Brush Back. Or one can dip in and out, savoring reflections on the arts, sports, crime, race relations, urban planning, politics, and even Mrs. O’Leary’s legendary cow. The selections do not shy from the underside of the city, recognizing that its grit and graft have as much a place in the written imagination as soaring odes and boosterism. As Neil Harris observes in his introduction, “Even when Chicagoans celebrate their hearth and home, they do so while acknowledging deep-seated flaws.” At the same time, this collection heartily reminds us all of what makes Chicago, as Norman Mailer called it, the “great American city.” With essays from, among others, Ira Berkow, Thomas Dyja, Ann Durkin Keating, Alex Kotlowitz, Toni Preckwinkle, Frank Rich, Don Share, Carl Smith, Regina Taylor, Garry Wills, and William Julius Wilson; and featuring works by Saul Bellow, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sandra Cisneros, Clarence Darrow, Erik Larson, David Mamet, Studs Terkel, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Frank Lloyd Wright, and many more.

FantazusMallare is a tortured artist who is slowly descending into madness. In a search for a muse and aided by a dwarf-monster, Goliath, Mallare tries to make sense of the world of reason versus that of insanity. Since its publication in 1924 and being banned in 1928 by the US Government, the book has achieved a cult status that strips the veneer of sanity, religion, lust and art. DigiCat presents to you the meticulously edited book with all the original black and white illustrations which earned it both its notoriety and praise. Excerpt: "FantaziusMallare considered himself mad because he was unable to behold in the meaningless gesturings of time, space and evolution a dramatic little pantomime adroitly centered about the routine of his existence. He was a silent looking man with black hair and an aquiline nose. His eyes were lifeless because they paid no homage to the world outside him. When he was thirty-five years old he lived alone high above a busy part of the town. He was a recluse. His black hair that fell in a slant across his forehead and the rigidity of his eyes gave him the appearance of a somnambulist. Twenty-twoHe found life unnecessary and submitted to it without curiosity. His ideas were profoundly simple. The excitement of his neighborhood, his city, his country and his world left him unmoved. He found no diversion in interpreting them. A friend had once asked him what he thought of democracy. This was during a great war being waged in its behalf. Mallare replied: "Democracy is the honeymoon of stupidity."

Ben Hecht’s critically acclaimed autobiographical memoir, first published in 1954, offers incomparably pungent evocations of Chicago in the 1910s and 1920s, Hollywood in the 1930s, and New York during the Second World War and after. “His manners are not always nice, but then nice manners do not always make interesting autobiographies, and this autobiography has the merit of being intensely interesting.”—Saul Bellow, New York Times Named to Time’s list of All-Time 100 Nonfiction Books, which deems it “the un-put-downable testament of the era’s great multimedia entertainer.”

Journalist. Suffragist. Antilynching crusader. In 1862, Ida B. Wells was born enslaved in Holly Springs, Mississippi. In 2020, she won a Pulitzer Prize. Ida B. Wells committed herself to the needs of those who did not have power. In the eyes of the FBI, this made her a “dangerous negro agitator.” In the annals of history, it makes her an icon. Ida B. the Queen tells the awe-inspiring story of an pioneering woman who was often overlooked and underestimated—a woman who refused to exit a train car meant for white passengers; a woman brought to light the horrors of lynching in America; a woman who cofounded the NAACP. Written by Wells’s great-granddaughter Michelle Duster, this “warm remembrance of a civil rights icon” (Kirkus Reviews) is a unique visual celebration of Wells’s life, and of the Black experience. A century after her death, Wells’s genius is being celebrated in popular culture by politicians, through song, public artwork, and landmarks. Like her contemporaries Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony, Wells left an indelible mark on history—one that can still be felt today. As America confronts the unfinished business of systemic racism, Ida B. the Queen pays tribute to a transformational leader and reminds us of the power we all hold to smash the status quo.

Showcasing the first Ferris wheel, dazzling and unprece­dented electrification, and exhibits from around the world, the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 was Chicago’s chance to demonstrate that it had risen from the ashes of the Great Fire and was about to take its place as one of the world’s great cities. Millions would flock to the fair, and many of them were looking for a good time before and after their visits to the Midway and the White City. But what was the bedazzled visitor to do in Chicago? Chicago by Day and Night: The Pleasure Seeker’s Guide to the Paris of America, a very unofficial guide to the world be­yond the fair, slaked the thirst of such curious folk. The plea­sures it details range from the respectable (theater, architec­ture, parks, churches and synagogues) to the illicit—drink, gambling, and sex. With a wink and a nod, the book decries vice while offering precise directions for the indulgence of any desire. In this newly annotated edition, Chicagoans Paul Durica and Bill Savage—who, if born earlier, might have written chapters in the original—provide colorful context and an informative introduction to a wildly entertaining journey through the Chicago of 120 years ago.