The Dial Bookshop

A purveyor of used, new, and rare books as well as chic stationery, we are located in the historical Fine Arts Building in Chicago.

The Dial's namesake was a literary magazine founded in 1840. From 1840 to 1844 it was a transcendentalist journal. Margaret Fuller served as its editor and its most notable contributor was Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1880 Francis Fisher Brown revived the magazine in The Fine Arts Building, with a focus on politics and literary criticism. The Dial's final and best known incarnation (1920-1929) was as a modernist literary magazine which published many influential writers, including T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, William Carlos Williams, and e e cummings.

In 1908 Francis Fisher Brown opened Browne's Bookstore on the seventh floor of the Fine Arts Building. The space was designed and outfitted by his friend Frank Lloyd Wright, who kept office in the building. Margaret Anderson, who worked for The Dial during the Francis Fisher Browne period, founded her modernist literary magazine, The Little Review, in the Fine Arts Building in 1914. Her magazine is perhaps best known for serializing James Joyce's Ulysses.

We – Peter Hopkins and Heidi Zheng – hope our shop can pay tribute to the rich literary history of the Fine Arts Building.