Donald Barliant owned Barbara’s Bookstore for more than 50 years, expanding it from a single shop in Old Town to a chain that at one point had more than 50 locations, many in airports around the country.
“He really epitomized the ability of a relatively small bookseller expanding to a point where at least in the Chicago area, Barbara’s Bookstore had a considerable presence,” said Donald Lamm, retired CEO of publisher W.W. Norton & Co.
Barliant, 86, died of heart failure on Dec. 9 at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he had lived since 1984, said his wife of 47 years, Janet Bailey.
Born Ernest Donald Barliant in Chicago, the bookstore owner grew up in a housing project near the West Side’s Little Italy neighborhood and later lived in the Austin neighborhood on the West Side.
After graduating from Austin High School, Barliant received a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, then picked up a law degree from DePaul University.
Early in his career, Barliant practiced labor law with Bernard Mamet, the father of noted playwright David Mamet. His practice later expanded to criminal and family law, his family said.
Barbara’s Bookstore was opened in 1963 by Barbara Siegel Kahn, the daughter of local authors’ agent Max Siegel, whose first store was in three-story Victorian building at 1434 N. Wells St. in Old Town that has since been demolished.
The store quickly gained notice, hosting book signings by authors such as cartoonist and satirist Jules Feiffer, social historian Lerone Bennett Jr. and historian Richard Clement Wade.
In 1967, Barliant answered an ad in the Wall Street Journal regarding an unnamed Chicago bookstore that was for sale. Intrigued, Barliant decided to buy Barbara’s from Kahn with the intention of running it “as a hobby,” his wife said.
“I would call him a born entrepreneur,” she said. “He was always embracing new things. But then he became so involved in it.”
While continuing to practice law, teaming up with several other partners to form the Chicago firm of Yaffe, Mark & Barliant, he began expanding Barbara’s. He opened a second bookstore at 2907 N. Broadway in 1971, in part because at Wells Street “he had two employees who were both manager material, but they were getting on each other’s nerves,” his wife said.
Even amid the expansion, Barbara’s maintained the vibe of a lively independent bookstore. A 1977 Tribune article likened the two Barbara’s Bookstore locations to San Francisco’s famous City Lights bookstore, while noting that the Chicago stores were “not as grungy.”
The original Wells Street store moved a block south on Wells in 1989, and closed in 2004 in part due to the opening of a nearby Borders bookstore.
The Barliants also had a store on Lake Street in Oak Park, which operated from the 1970s until closing in 2010 amid a rent dispute. Outside Chicago, Barbara’s had space in more than 40 Macy’s department stores around the U.S., at airports in New York City and Philadelphia, and at the South Station rail station and bus terminal in Boston.
“Our core business is the quality trade literary bookstore,” Barliant told the Tribune in 2009. “That’s our true love.”
The bookstores at O’Hare International Airport were co-owned with N’DIGO publisher Hermene Hartman.
“He knew how to run a bookstore — it was passion as well as business,” Hartman said. “And he was funny as heck. He was quite honest and progressive.”
Barliant also provided books to large meetings and conventions.
“I used to refer to him in the old cliché as David up against the Goliath when it came to competing with Amazon, and one of the cannier things he did was to actually contest Amazon for large shipments of books to meetings and conventions,” Lamm said. “His knowledge of the book trade was phenomenal.”
As business partners, Barliant assumed the role of a strategic planner while Bailey oversaw book buying. Concluding that they could run their chain remotely, the couple moved to Santa Fe in 1984.
“He was an early adopter of computers and a satellite dish, and he bought (an early) IBM computer and taught himself how to program,” Bailey said. “Part of his entrepreneurship was his ability to program, and eventually, we had computers everywhere, and we still use that software. He was constantly finding new things to get interested in and then mastering them.”
Today, Barbara’s Bookstore has 11 locations, all in the Chicago area.
A first marriage to Esther Scholar ended in divorce. In addition to his wife, Barliant is survived by two sons, Scott and Jared; a daughter, Rebecca Schwartz; a stepdaughter, Kari Hubbard; a sister, Marlene Frank; and nine grandchildren;
A private memorial service is scheduled for later in January.
Bob Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.
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