San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Death of Rosengren’s proprietor closes another chapter of storied bookstore
Like a sommelier for fine books instead of wine, Camille Rosengren could pick the perfect work of fiction, Texana or other literature for even the most discerning reader.
She was carrying on a family tradition that made Rosengren’s Books the most storied bookseller in San Antonio, starting in the 1930s with Frank and Florence Rosengren and continuing well into the 1980s with their bibliophile daughter-in-law, whom everyone called “Cam.”
Now the story of Rosengren’s Books’ last matron has come to an end.
Camille Rosengren died Saturday from heart failure at her historic 18th-century home in the city’s River Road neighborhood, a bookmark at her bedside. She was 94.
Born Camille Sweeney in 1926, the San Antonio native was an assistant librarian at San Antonio College and a researcher for the Institute of Texan Cultures before taking up the Rosengren’s mantle.
“She was the smartest woman I’ve ever known,” said Rosengren’s daughter Emily Ferry, a film and television props master in Los Angeles. “And she loved the book world so much.”
Many loved the world she maintained at Rosengren’s. For 52 years, the downtown bookstore was the South Texas salon for the intelligentsia, drawing famous patrons whose own bestselling books lined the shelves.
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Robert Frost once called Rosen
gren’s “the greatest of bookstores,” an endorsement he left on a signed photo of himself for the store in 1938. “Lonesome Dove” novelist Larry McMurtry was so inspired by his store visits that he opened his own antiquarian shop, and in the early ’80s, “Roots” author Alex Haley frequented the store during his brief stay in San Antonio.
That framed photo of Frost later hung in Rosengren’s home, where she had architect Richard Mogas craft high shelves with rolling ladders to house the many books she loved.
Former Express-News Business Editor and columnist David Hendricks, recalling the last time he was in Rosengren’s home in 2017, said, “I felt like I was back in the store.”
Hendricks frequented
Rosengren’s during his 42 years at the newspaper. He said he sometimes played hooky at the store when he needed a little creative inspiration, only to return to the newsroom 20 minutes later knowing exactly how to write that next story.
And it usually happened under Rosengren’s watchful eye.
“She was one of the last
great independent booksellers in America,” Hendricks said. “And she certainly was a bright light on the San Antonio literary scene.”
San Antonio historian Mary Carolyn Hollers George celebrated the store’s legacy in her 2015 book “Rosengren’s Books: An Oasis for Mind and Spirit.”
Hollers George said
Rosengren relished running the downtown store and made the most out of keeping it alive for as long as she did, as independent bookshops fell prey to chains such as Barnes & Noble.
“It wasn’t about selling books,” Hollers George said. “It was about loving books.”
Technically, the Rosengren name in book retail started in early 20th-century Chicago.
In 1919, former musician Knute “Frank Rose” Rosengren opened an antiquarian store on Chicago’s North State Street. A handful of years later, he met customer Florence Kednay, whom he would later marry.
In 1926, the Rosengrens had a son, Frank Jr., nicknamed Figgi, who later went by Frank Duane Rosengren and earned acclaim as a playwright. The family moved to San Antonio after Figgi developed bronchitis, then opened Rosengren’s Books in 1935 on the sixth floor of the Milam Building.
Rosengren’s initially specialized in rare first editions from scribes such as Henry Fielding and Oliver Goldsmith. A few months later, the store moved down to the Milam’s street level and added new releases to its stock of classics.
Frank Rosengren Sr. died in 1949, leaving his wife to cultivate the shop’s
reputation for handpicked selections and hands-on service.
Camille Sweeney’s induction into the family business was much like her mother-in-law’s. In 1950, she was a young customer at Rosengren’s while living in the St. Anthony Hotel. She later met Frank Rosengren Jr. while helping his mother with a book-signing party. They married in 1951.
The Rosengrens lived in Dallas and New York, returning to San Antonio in the early 1960s.
By then, Rosengren’s had moved to the Crockett Hotel, where the store made a name for itself with author book signings and merchandise bearing gold-and-black stickers with the Rosengren’s name.
“I have lots of books with that gold-and-black sticker that says Rosengren’s,” Hendricks said.
Former Mayor Phil Hardberger found a second home at Rosengren’s in the early 1970s, back when he was new in town with a law practice so slow he often filled his afternoons with trips to the store.
Those sojourns soon led to connections with fellow lawyers and other power brokers in town. But it was the contemplative and sophisticated quality of the store that most impressed him.
In his introduction to
Hollers George’s book, Hardberger referred to Rosengren’s as “a salon of civilization and enlightenment that made us all better citizens.”
Camille Rosengren gradually took over running the store from her mother-in-law; Florence Rosengren retired in the late 1970s. Renovations at the Crockett forced the store to move in 1982 to its final location at 223 Losoya St., where the back of the store overlooked the River Walk.
Rosengren’s closed in 1987, another independent bookstore lost to the wave of larger chains with deeper discounts. Florence Rosengren died the following year. Frank Duane Rosengren died in 2010.
Hendricks said Camille Rosengren had a saying: “People don’t think anything about spending $50 at a restaurant for a meal, but they won’t spend $15 for a book that might change their lives.”
Nevertheless, Rosengren’s was the vanguard for independent bookselling in 20th-century San Antonio, paving the way for later local stores such as Booksmiths and Red Balloon, as well as the still-standing Twig Book Shop in the Pearl.
“I always thought of Rosengren’s as being just so connected with writers and the literary world,” said Twig Book Shop buyer Susanna Nawrocki. “(And Camille) was just so knowledgeable. Of course, she worked with books forever.”
Ferry said even in her mother’s last weeks, she was reading, poring over San Antonio author William Jack Sibley’s new book, “Here We Go Loop De Loop,” with a magnifying glass and keeping up with the headlines.
“Even till the end, a couple of weeks ago, she was just so well read and so brilliant,” Ferry said.