GEOGRAPHICALLY SPEAKING...

People came to my prior store, Magazine Museum, in Morton Grove for 20 years to buy a magazine from a particular week or month for a birthday or anniversary. Still a great idea, and still the principal focus of this store.

But after that store closed and I decided to try one more time in Skokie, last March, I had a different idea besides periodicals based on date. I spent the last several months organizing my previously undisplayed National Geographics--which go back to 1915--by subject, instead. This idea is not available anywhere else, period.

By subject, I mean that if a person wants to give a distinctive gift to a person based on their interests and not some arbitrary date, I now have over 100 choices to choose from, most with full-color plates and from 1915 to 1939:

Basques; Honeybees; France; Native Americans; Ancient Greece; Chicago in 1919; New York City in 1918; World Flags in 1934; Horses; Cattle; Spiders; Large Mammals; Fish (endless variety, and also birds); Flight in its earliest times; Aboriginal Australia; Papua New Guinea and Java...featuring detailed discussions and photos of headhunters; Butterflies; Dogs; Cats; Wild Flowers; Tibet; Mongolia; China from twenty perspectives; ditto Italy and ancient Rome; Central America; Brazil; Circuses; Frogs; the Auto Industry in 1923; Coffee; Africa in endless perspectives and Israel when it was Palestine; Saudi Arabia when it was created; Albania in 1931; Railroads; Mongolia;

The Indiana Sand Dunes in 1919; Revolutionary Russia...and so on.

The Old World as it once was between World War One and Two, in color.

Very much like the Skokie Library, except 80 or 90 years ago. This is, I believe, an incredible resource that is unique to Skokie and found nowhere else in the USA and has taken me considerable time to organize into an instantly accessible form. I hope people are curious and will come to see what they now have available to them for school, research projects, or any reason.

If Downtown Skokie wants to claim something special about itself as a reason for people to come visit it, well, here's a pretty good reason. See for yourself.