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• In Baltimore, closing Borders is a routine part of the book business.

B FREDERICK N. RASMUSSEN [Baltimore Sun] – When the Remington Book Store folded in 1986, it marked the end of one of the city’s best-known and most-reliable booksellers. It had been serving Baltimoreans since its founding in 1910 by Stanley G. Remington and William Wollstonecraft Norman, an Oxford-educated scholar.

Remington had entered the book business in 1894 working for Joseph M. Cushing, and after realizing he needed more money, took a job with a local railroad compiling statistics. Bored, he returned to the book business when he took a job at J. Edward Nunn on North Howard Street, and then shifted to Eichelberger’s Book Store at 327 N. Charles St.

The partners moved the Norman Remington Co. store in 1916 to the southeast corner of Charles and Mulberry streets, and remained together for the next 15 years until Remington bought out Norman in 1931…

Remington died in 1951. His son, John T. Remington, took over operation of the business in 1930 and ran it until his death in 1978, when it was taken over by his son, John C. Remington…

“Remington’s is where the typical Baltimorean goes if he wishes to obtain in one transaction the No. 1 item on the New York Times list of best-sellers in fiction, the Modern Library edition — all 7 volumes — of Proust’s masterpiece, and the latest edition of Merriman Webster’s Biographical Dictionary,” editorial writer and historian Gerald W. Johnson wrote in The Sun in 1977.

In 1979, Remington’s closed its store at Charles and Mulberry, which had been managed since 1966 by George Leinwall, a colorful and somewhat crusty book appraiser, raconteur, bibliophile, and collector of rare volumes of James Joyce, Arthur Rackham and Joseph Conrad. He counted among his many customers Ogden Nash, John Dos Passos and Gerald Johnson…At the time of the Charles Street closing, Leinwall told a reporter, “The world will go on, I assure you. This will not affect the course of human nature or of human life.”

Reassigned to the store at Baltimore and Calvert, Leinwall continued to greet customers and address friends with his characteristic “Brother.” As he had in the Charles Street store, he maintained a back room that he called his sanctum sanctorum, where rare used books and Marylandia were stored.

Continued in The Baltimore Sun | More Chronicle & Notices.

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