Photo By David Sorcher

The staff at Ohio Bookstore includes (L-R) James Fallon Jr., Annette Riehle, Dick Baringhaus, owner James Fallon and Michael Fallon.

One floor below the 1838 leather-bound edition of Julius Caesar Quae Extant Interpretation et Notis ($150) sit stacks and stacks of Bibles and cookbooks. In fact, well-worn and stained copies of The Joy of Cooking number second only to the Bible among the 1,000-some books that arrive in the Ohio Bookstore's book bindery for restoration every year.

The three employees of this basement bindery restore some very rare and valuable books, such as a large Bible dating to 1599 whose handmade pages need a new leather cover to protect them, according to employee Michael Fallon. But most of the books waiting for him, his brother James Fallon Jr. or co-worker Annette Riehle to repair pages slipping from their broken spines or bent, torn or missing covers are only valuable to their owners.

Michael Fallon fingers a Bible whose thin pages are falling out. It's special only because it's been with its owner for 15 years; her notes fill the margins. Because there aren't enough of those margins to re-sew the pages, they'll be carefully glued by hand.

Such painstaking work is the hallmark of this five-person operation, where nearly everything has been done by hand for 20 years.

Meanwhile, rising four stories plus a landing above the basement bookbindery are 250,000 of the used and antiquarian books that have shaped the lives of Ohio Bookstore owner Jim Fallon, his sons and now their children.

Rounders and Amazon.com
The Ohio Bookstore is easy to pass by, sandwiched at 726 Main St. between a small produce shop and a cell phone store. Luckily it doesn't rely on foot traffic for business.

"Most people don't come to our store because they're walking by," Jim Fallon says. "They come here because they want to come here."

That means Saturdays are often the bookstore's busiest days.

"We're a destination shop," Michael Fallon says. "A lot of customers drive an hour or two or more to get here."

They often tell him, "I wish we had a store like this in our town," yet Cincinnatians pay the store little attention, he says.

The Internet has changed the book business a lot, says his father. People used to send handwritten postcards looking for specific books. Nowadays the bookstore deals with online behemoths such as Amazon.com by selling its own books there, shipping between two and 30 packages every day to places all over the world.

Yet the technology for binding new limited-run books -- such as the Government of the Virgin Islands Official Gazette 2003 Vol. 1 or a year's worth of one man's loose-leaf journal -- and the technology for repairing books hasn't changed much in hundreds of years.

To emboss a book, the workers start with handset moveable type in one of 50 different fonts. To make hardbound books' spines round, they use a rounder identical to the one in the 1930s black-and-white photographs hanging in the stairwell.

Prices run from about $15 for embossed personalization through $30 to $40 for most restorations to hundreds for the most time-intensive restoration work.

So ... are they hiring?

Michael Fallon laughs.

"We get that question a lot," he says.

But he says there's no time for the intensive training that would be required. Besides, his father says later, it's hard enough paying a living wage to the employees he already has.

Yet the store stays afloat, the only one left out of 10 downtown book stores listed in a directory from 1940.

"We're successful because of my employees," Jim Fallon says.

Riehle has been at the store for 18 years. Employee Richard Baringhaus, whose mother was once Fallon's secretary, has worked here 35 years.

But no one can beat Fallon's own 48 years at Ohio Bookstore. His aunt was the store's secretary when it sat at 544 Main St. James Hardwick founded it in 1940, making Ohio Bookstore the oldest extant bookstore in Cincinnati.

In 1957, the summer between Fallon's seventh- and eighth-grade years, his aunt asked him to help at the store. He took a bus downtown from Norwood to sweep and shelve his way through high school and then night classes at Xavier University, until in 1971 Fallon bought the business.

"It's a labor of love, not a labor of money," Fallon says. "We work hard. We're here six days a week, nine hours a day."

'All these books are mine'
Such a family-bound work ethic has kept Ohio Bookstore going this long, but not even that can ensure the bookstore's continued solvency. The bindery, which usually enjoys two or three months' backlog of work, is strangely caught-up.

"This is the first time in the past 20 years we've been slow," Fallon says. "I don't know if it's the economy or what."

He won't comment on the possibility of moving. But Fallon makes it clear there's nothing in retirement to tempt him.

"It's so nice to have my kids here," he says.

He cherishes his customers.

"There are so many things that I learn every day because they're a lot smarter than me," he says. He's known some of the bookstore's regulars for 40 years. Now he helps their children build libraries.

"We've built some tremendous libraries for individuals, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars," he says.

Fallon hints that he has on a short list of names, which he declines to disclose, a few very wealthy and powerful Cincinnatians. When he sees a book that would interest one of them, he makes a call and sets up what is often a donation to a library or a historical society.

Yet members of the Fallon family don't have extensive private book collections of their own.

"All these books are mine," Fallon says, sweeping his arm across rows of books rising 20 feet.

Michael Fallon says that, with two young girls at home, he collects mostly children's books. He reads to them every night; his second-grader, in turn, reads at a fourth-grade level.

His sister home-schools her children on a farm. But even they don't get far from the bookstore.

A few months ago Jim Fallon bought two collections totaling 40,000 books. His grandchildren helped him sort and stack them, just as he's been doing since he started half a century ago. ©