ABSTRACT
In 1916, two women, Madge Jenison and Mary Mowbray-Clarke, opened ‘The Sunwise Turn, The Modern Bookshop’ on East 31st Street in New York City. The owners saw themselves as cultural missionaries in the capitalist jungle of Manhattan, clearing a space for culture, creating a place of inspiration and enlightenment. Within seven years they were at each other’s throats, suing over the assets of the shop, finally selling out to Doubleday. John Tebbel in his authoritative History of Book Publishing in the United States notes that the Sunwise Turn was ‘probably the prototype of the small “personal” bookshop’ and states that Madge Jenison’s memoir, The Sunwise Turn, was ‘an influential guide to “personal” bookstore operation’. 1 This sounds straightforward, but the archives tell a darker story. The boxes of material at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, include manuscripts of talks by the partners, ledgers, correspondence, and the formal minutes of the Board of Directors’ meetings. It is a tale of fascinating characters: Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who argued for a return to medieval systems of finance and then hired a clever lawyer to try to swindle her partners out of their back wages; Madge Jenison, who leapt from the sinking Sunwise Turn and then wrote a chatty book advising all young women to start bookstores; Harold Loeb, the model for Robert Cohn in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, who adventured in western Canada, founded a little magazine in Italy, and wound up as a bureaucrat for the Food and Drug Administration; and his cousin Peggy Guggenheim, who was too incompetent to work the till but who claimed her interest in art collecting came from her experience at the Sunwise Turn. The narrative arc of the Sunwise Turn is one of idealism and missionary zeal turning to bitterness and capitulation to the market, with the accompanying trajectory of a proudly liminal space – private and public, domestic and commercial – devolving into a space that was completely commodified, that of a chain store.
