Some Milwaukee things come and go, while some become icons. Mandatory Milwaukee is all about the latter. This week: Renaissance Books!
Even in a world rife with digital distractions, it’s not uncommon to find books for sale in an airport. After all, it can’t hurt to pick up a hard copy of the latest bestseller and/or ghostwritten celebrity autobiography in case your laptop, iPhone, iPad, and/or Tiger Electronics version of Street Fighter II runs out of juice on the way to Denver, can it?
But how many airports in the country can claim not just a bookstore, but a used bookstore? And we’re talking a fairly big, fairly stuffed, and fairly musty used bookstore at that. Not many, we’re guessing, but Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport can: Renaissance Books.
Located in the pre-security main terminal between the delightful Mitchell Gallery of Flight and a closet-sized shoe shining place, Renaissance Books has been a Milwaukee airport staple for nearly 50 years. George John opened the first Renaissance Books on Wisconsin Avenue in 1959. He was soon joined by his brother, Robert John. Two decades later, the brothers split, and Robert John moved Renaissance Books to Plankinton Avenue. He eventually won a bid on an airport space previously occupied by another bookstore, and opened the airport Renaissance location in 1979. (The infamously overstuffed Plankinton location closed in 2011. The original airport Renaissance was in a section of the airport that has since been demolished.)
“Throughout the past four decades, the storefront has been up for bid a few more times,” said Wisconsin Public Radio in a 2023 profile, “but Renaissance Books remains.”
Take a stroll through the space today and you’ll encounter everything that makes used bookstores so special: friendly employees; towering shelves stuffed to the gills with books; and individual shelves loaded with everything from literature, mysteries, music, sci-fi, and true crime to history, poetry, kids lit, manga, and gender studies. All that’s missing is the standard-issue used bookstore cat, though we imagine the airport probably frowns upon that sort of thing.
Seriously: it’s an honest-to-goodness used bookstore…in an airport! How great is that!
And Renaissance isn’t just for random paperback reads, either. Looking to invest in a vintage 21-volume set of Thomas Hardy novels for $400? Renaissance is the place for you! (Good luck fitting it all in the overhead compartment.)
How unusual is Renaissance Books in the increasingly homogenous and irritating world of air travel? Unusual enough to include a gently snarky FAQ amongst its shelves. (We can lend you that Spanish-language book on herbal medicine for farm animals, FYI.)
Thank you for your gently used service, Renaissance Books. May you continue to be an analog oasis in a digital hellscape, a breath of fresh air in a polluted and hostile environment, and a whiff of used-book-smell in a scorched-jet-fuel atmosphere.
Oh, and what better book to buy at your friendly independently owned bookstore than a book about…books! Read more books! Both in the air and on the ground!
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