Venerable Burke's Book Store, which has survived the depression and two World Wars, was begun in 1875 as a family business and stayed that way for 3 generations. Walter Burke Sr. gave birth to Burke's Book Store on Main Street shortly after the Civil War, selling books, newspapers, slates, tin toys, and then, beginning in 1946, public and parochial school textbooks. Bill Burke, who was born above the bookstore, followed in his father's footsteps and, in 1950, began selling used and antiquarian books, as a hedge against schools selling their own textbooks.

           In the sixties, during that great urban purge known as Renewal, Burke's moved eastward to 634 Poplar, in among the pawnshops, and the original Main St. building and surrounding neighborhood was razed. Flattened flatter than a beaten coin, flatter than the fens of Holland.

In the 1970s, no one in the Burkes family wanted to continue in the book business and they sold the store to Diana Crump. She, in turn, sold it to Harriette Beeson in the mid 80s and Harriette moved the store in 1988 to its present location at 1719 Poplar.

           In 2000 Corey and Cheryl Mesler, after working there for over a decade, bought the store and vowed to "keep it cool." The store has expanded over the years, like a gas, and now encompasses, as its slogan says, "the best of the old, the latest of the new, and hard to find collectibles." In its present incarnation it has played host to a wide range of writers, honored scriveners of the modern, plumbers of the collective unconscious, including John Grisham, Richard Ford, Ann Beattie, Anne Rice, Bobbie Ann Mason, Kaye Gibbons, Peter Guralnick, Peter Carey, Lee Smith, Ralph Abernathy, Archie Manning, Rick Barthelme, Charles Baxter, Robert Olen Butler, Bill Wyman, and many others, to whom the Mesler still genuflect in gratitude.

           Visitors/shoppers--to the store include Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley, Courtney Love, Gene Hackman, Mary Louise Parker, Benecio Del Toro, Adrian Belew, Carla Thomas, REM, and Will Patton (yes, you do too know who he is).

           Today, muddling toward the future, the Meslers keep the old flame burning, still cognizant of their role in the community, re-energizing the store's once semi-active publishing arm, still remembering the signed W. C. Handy autobiography, the book bound in skin, the first edition Uncle Tom's Cabin. It's a heady business, a calling, a place of sympathetic magic. Oh, and they still sell textbooks.

Corey Mesler
chmesler@earthlink.net

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