This is a customer reply card from Solle’s Bookstore from 1941. Solle named the local train “Maude” and credited her for delivering his books. Courtesy Leelanau Historical Society
Rarely does death strike the same family twice within one week. But shortly after Carrie Solle was called to Chicago in March of 1949 to be with her sister whose husband had died, she got another call that her own husband had died as well.
William H. Solle, “World Famous Omena Bookseller”, was home alone on that Sunday afternoon when he became ill. He called Dr Johnson of Northport, who found him unconscious when he arrived, and rushed him to the hospital in Traverse City by ambulance. It was there that he died shortly after arriving of a heart attack. It was March 1949 and Will was 59 years old according to the Leelanau Enterprise. “His spirit will carry on,” says a letter to the editor of the Enterprise that week. “… and many of us will continue to be better people because of Will Solle.”
From Chicago to Omena
Will Solle with his customers and books in 1941. Courtesy Leelanau Historical Society
Will began his bookselling years at Kroch’s, a large bookshop on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. Will worked hard, and became known for his knowledge of books in this ever growing establishment. By 1932 he was a vice president at Kroch’s, as well as a buyer and head salesman. The country was deep into the depression, and Will undoubtedly felt the pressure of trying to be successful in the book business when the general population was having to scratch for a living. He was driven to work long hours to keep the business afloat.
After fourteen years his health forced Solle to resign from Kroch’s, and take a recuperative year away from the stress. An old friend, a writer who knew Omena well having spent many summers here with her young son Wally Cox, recommended Omena as the perfect place to recuperate. Solle moved with his family and his personal library of 2,000 books to a yellow house surrounded by apple trees near Mougey Lake in Omena.
After a year of reading and recovering, Solle had spent down his savings. He knew that a job would be waiting for him back in Chicago. But he’d grown fond of Omena’s mix of rural and cosmopolitan. But what could he do here? He wasn’t cut out to be a farmer or an inn keeper.
He tried making jigsaw puzzles and Christmas Cards but needed steady employment. In the summer of 1933, Solle went back to his roots and opened a small bookstore in his house. He had accumulated a wealth of books, first and limited editions, autographed copies and specially bound and illustrated books. He turned his living room into his bookshop and hung a sign from a tree by the road.
Solle’s Bookshop – Drive In
His wife, Carrie Cabaniss Solle, who had been a young librarian from Kentucky when he met and married her as a student, helped him in his living room bookshop. Gordon, his son, also helped out in the shop, and carried it on after Will’s death for a while.
When things began to slow down in November of 1933, Solle wrote to a few Chicago friends offering books he knew they would be interested in. Word spread, and soon he was getting requests from other friends, and old customers. Solle made up a catalog of his remaining books and sent it out to 500 people at first. Four years later the catalog went to 1,700 people.
After that most of his customers arrived not in person, but through the mail. Within two years of launching his endeavor, he was filling 150 book orders a month from his home, many of them for three or four books. He became, as he noted, “A country bookstore doing an international mail order business.”
But he was more than the Amazon of 1938. Solle offered his customers their own book-a-month selection on an entirely personal basis. “This service is unique,” he wrote in one of his advertisements, “since no strings are attached and the book is chosen for you alone.”
New Bookshop
This is where Solle moved his book store when he outgrew his living room. It is just south of Omena on M-22. (1938) Courtesy Omena Historical Society
By 1938, Solles sales had outgrown his living room. In July, Solle opened his new bookshop in a white clapboard house just off of M-22 a little south of Omena, with a large window overlooking both the road and the bay beyond. He was successful enough to meet expenses the first year, and soon needed more room so added an addition.
Solle’s Bookshop helped to keep Omena going through some difficult times, when the resort era had faded and the Great Depression hit the whole nation. His many book orders helped the Post Office stay afloat, and even helped to keep Maude, the train, profitable. Without them both Solle wouldn’t have been able to operate his business in what he liked to call “the wilderness”. Delivering his book orders helped keep them running both as well.
Will was important to Omena as a person also. He was well loved as someone who had a great zest for life, a quiet kind of zest that was far reaching and deep. He sincerely loved and respected each man for what he was and did. He was a man of books, but more than being a bookseller, he was a man of and for people. He remembered names, he remembered faces, and he remembered minds. And he was even witty when the occasion presented itself.
While not born in the Leelanau, his presence here since the 1930’s rooted him here. One of Solle’s customers wrote in an unsigned letter to the editor in the March 31st, 1949 edition of the Leelanau Enterprise that “Solle’s Bookstore in Omena seems as much a permanent part of the county as does Sleeping Bear Dunes, or the blue waters of Omena Bay, which he loved so much.”