Can This Little Bookstore Save a Rust-Belt Town?

Author: Will Bardenwerper, The Free Press (Culture and Ideas) URL: https://www.thefp.com/p/steubenville-bookstore-rust-belt-revival-ohio Published: August 26, 2026 One-line: A reported portrait of BookMarx, a classics-and-theology bookstore in declining Steubenville, Ohio, as a small experiment in whether community institutions can do what economics alone can’t.

Paid-subscriber post. The page summary below was written from the article as read in Kyle’s logged-in Chrome session on 2026-09-15; only the free preview is archived (see Full text).

Summary

The town. Steubenville (about 18,000 people, on Ohio’s eastern border) was a steel and manufacturing hub with two opera houses in the late 1800s. Its downtown decline started when a suburban mall opened in 1974. The landmark Hub department store closed six years later. Foreign steel competition in the 1980s and NAFTA in 1994 followed, and Jefferson County has lost about 75% of its manufacturing jobs. Median household income is under $50,000, the riverfront hosts a jail and a wastewater plant, and the county voted 71% for Trump in 2024. Young families are buying houses for under $100,000.

The store. Peter and Patricia Marx founded BookMarx online in 2002 and opened a storefront in 2008 as a community home for study groups, concerts and lectures. In 2023 they handed it to John Byron Kuhner, a Princeton classicist who grew up poor in Queens and left prep-school teaching, and his wife Catherine. It specializes in classical literature, theology and the ancient world. It hosts a Jane Austen Regency ball, a classics book club reading The Odyssey, a Hobbit party, and summer “First Friday” festivals that drive rare foot traffic.

The economics. They are hard. On one visit, a single customer came in over two hours. Kuhner argues that if every Steubenville adult spent $5 a year downtown, the shops would survive. He calls shopping at Walmart dehumanizing, and Amazon orders push the town toward extinction. A neighbor who once lived in Paris and Buenos Aires, where fixed book prices protect independents, calls the store a “perfect third place.” Kuhner concedes book sales won’t move the local economy and argues for a community value that can’t be measured in economic terms. His family lives simply, in a century-old house with a 2003 Malibu, out of “a religious commitment to a simple life.”

The author’s close. In an era of loneliness, places like this may be worth more than what we thoughtlessly spend on instead, and he plans to bring his family back for the town’s annual birthday party for Bilbo Baggins.

Full text

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Connections

• Third Places — the explicit frame for what the store provides.
• Main Street and Small Business — the downtown-revival question.
• Deindustrialization — Steubenville’s steel-town arc; compare Hillbilly Elegy and J.D. Vance’s Ohio.
• Walmart and Amazon — the forces Kuhner blames for the hollowing of local retail.
• J.R.R. Tolkien — the store’s Hobbit and Bilbo Baggins traditions.
• City Building