Young’s Book Exchange

The fourth 1922 post for our annual celebration of Black History Month.

One hundred years ago today … Young’s Book Exchange advertised itself as the “only establishment dedicated to collecting and distributing the history and literature of the African and his descendants.”

The shop was located in the heart of Harlem at 135 W. 135th Street, not far from the offices of the New York Age. (It would later move to 255 W. 144th Street.) The store was started in 1914 by owner George Young, whom Jeffrey Babcock Perry describes as “a self-educated bibliophile and bookseller… who had worked as a Pullman porter and a postal employee and was active with the Ethical Culture Society” (77). It put on exhibitions of Black culture; a 1914 item in the Age announced one overseen by two women. “Youngs Book Exchange with Mme. Mari Jackson Stewart and Edith Leonard in charge are showing Negro literature, post-cards of Booker T. Washington and pennants of Harriet Tubman and the Autumn Exposition” (New York Age, 1 October 1914, p. 2.). Perry describes Stewart (“Marie Jackson Stuart” as a suffragist activist and Leonard as a social worker (76).

A 1917 letter to the editor, presumably by Young, name-drops the two most influential Black realtors of the moment

The store’s bookseller stamp is seen on this copy of J.A. Rogers’s From Superman to Man.

References/ Further reading:

Perry, Jeffrey Babcock. Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918. New York: Columbia UP, 2009.

– Jonathan Goldman, Feb 9, 2022

TAGS: Black history, African American women, Black business, advertising, bookstores, literature, commerce