Like many avid readers in this corner of northeast Illinois searching out bargain books, we knew Eileen Donohoe’s Winthrop Harbor bookshop was the place to wander when looking for a load of new reading material.
For more than 50 years, Donohoe — who died late last month after struggling with cancer — served those of us looking for good deals at Galaxy of Books. She opened her independently owned, used book store at 1908 Sheridan Road in Zion shortly after graduating from Zion-Benton High School.
Years later, she moved her store north to Winthrop Harbor at 1704 7th St., just off Sheridan Road. Her presence in the store, just blocks from the gateway to Northpoint Marina, will be missed.
Hopefully, someone steps in and continues keeping the store’s collection of gently used books, comics and other entertainment sundries alive. And her legacy.
That legacy was curating a large collection, starting as an antiquarian book dealer, then switching to mass-market books. Donohoe estimated having more than 25,000 mainly paperbacks on hand when the store was centered in Zion.
The selections ranged from mysteries, romances, Westerns, horror, science fiction, military, hunting/fishing and cookbooks. Included in the offerings were new and used collector comics, which surely helped pay the rent.
As her obituary earlier this month in The News-Sun noted: “Throughout her life, and particularly through her bookstore, she touched the lives of a great many people.”
I first discovered Galaxy of Books in the late 1970s when paperbacks soared to the then-unheard-of price of $2.50. Today, those same books new are at the $10 level and beyond.
In those Swingin’ ’70s, though, Donohoe sold paperbacks for 35 cents, or three for a dollar. She also would take trades, two-for-one, if readers wanted to divest their book shelves of aging and yellowing books, sharing them with others who enjoy literature roving for their next read or collectible diamond in the rough.
It was a good bartering system for those who didn’t have cellphones to scroll, television to stream or e-books to read, and could burn through books weekly. Despite having an overabundance of Harlequin romances, her Zion stock was full of genres for everyone’s reading tastes. They included past years of issues of National Geographic.
A good used bookstore is a treasure in any community, and is a local business that supports its neighbors. This is especially true in these times, when it is estimated that more than half of the books sold in the U.S. are purchased online through Amazon.
Like Galaxy of Books, inexpensive paperbacks are the meat and potatoes of neighborhood bookshops. For some of us, the smell of cheap pulp paper with the printed word adorning pages is a siren calling. As it must have been for Paul McCartney who penned “Paperback Writer” for The Beatles in 1966.
We snare more books than we might read in a year, walking out of a bookstore with an armful of future reads. But like a fine wine, they ripen on our bookshelves, waiting to be uncorked months or years after with that pleasant paper-and-ink aroma.
Indeed, paperbacks were once known as “pulp books,” following their predecessors “pulp magazines.” With budget printing techniques, paperbacks allowed much of America to eschew hard covers for pocket-sized reading material one could, for the most part, take anywhere inconspicuously.
Paperbacks go back to the mid-19th century with the publication of “dime” novels, mainly tales of the American West, whose sales were nudged along by the expansion of railroads across the continent. The era of modern U.S. paperbacks began with the Pocket Books company in 1939.
Before the advent of bookstores in malls or standalones, as Barnes & Noble has today, nearly every drug store had a rack of the latest paperbacks, which spun around in portable wire kiosks. Yard and garage sales were flush with the sale of paperbacks.
Eileen Donohoe made a living selling people those bargain books for decades. Her obit spelled out one of the attractions of walking into the shop and looking for an old mystery: “She was always quick with a smile, a laugh and a joke. Her unending kindness to others will never be forgotten.”
Because that was essentially her, talking about authors and their books as you browsed the abundant shelves of Galaxy of Books, on the prowl for a good read.
Charles Selle is a former News-Sun reporter, political editor and editor.
sellenews@gmail.com
X: @sellenews
