BURKE’S BOOK STORE, A SHORT HISTORY
Venerable Burke’s Book Store, which survived the depression and two World Wars, was begun in 1875 as a family business and stayed that way for three generations. Walter Burke,Sr. gave birth to Burke’s Book Store on Main Street near Poplar Avenue shortly after the Civil War selling books, newspapers, slates and tin toys. His son, Walter,Jr, who was born above the bookstore, followed in his father’s footsteps when the founder died in 1911. Public and parochial school textbooks were sold throughout the 1930’s and 40’s. In 1950, Bill Burke followed his father in the business and 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.
Following the death of Bill Burke in 1978, no one in the Burke family desired to continue in the book business. They sold the store to Diana Crump. Harriette Beeson bought Burke's in the mid 80s and moved the store in 1988 to 1719 Poplar.
In 2000, husband and wife, Corey and Cheryl Mesler, who met in the store, and after working there for over a decade, bought Burke’s 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).
The Meslers have moved the store to its present location, 936 Cooper Street and, muddling toward the future, they 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.
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