Hungry Mind (bookstore)

In its nearly thirty-four years, from 1970 to 2004, the Hungry Mind grew from a tiny neighborhood bookshop to a regional powerhouse with a national reach. It became a favored venue for appearances by hundreds of authors of local, national, and international stature. Its quarterly book review, the Hungry Mind Review, reached tens of thousands of readers in all fifty states and across Canada. Its press, Hungry Mind Press, published fifty titles. It promoted the local literary arts, especially small presses, poetry and fiction, and their creators. Financial pressures forced it to close in the summer of 2004.

In 1970 an idea occurred to David Unowsky: Open a bookstore in his neighborhood, near Macalester College in St. Paul. It debuted with two small rooms in October of that year, and he called it the Hungry Mind. In 1972 it became the Macalester College bookstore, and the college became its banker and landlord at its permanent location, 1648 Grand Avenue.

Unowsky took as his missions providing a wide variety of titles, tending to his customers’ interests, and supporting local writers and presses. In the late 1970s the store began hosting author readings—at first, mostly local poets. This practice slowly expanded. By the mid-1980s national publishing houses were regularly sending, at their expense, writers of national and international renown.

The writers who appeared at Hungry Mind events (there would be more than 1,500) ranged from Minnesota baseball stars Dave Winfield and Kirby Puckett to Nobel Prize winners Orhan Pamuk and Kazuo Ishiguro. Others included Jimmy Carter, Kurt Vonnegut, Hunter S. Thompson, Isabel Allende, Studs Turkel, Molly Ivins, Norman Mailer, John Updike, Gloria Steinem, David Sedaris, Hilary Clinton, and hundreds more recognizable names. Hungry Mind readings were always free, but due to high demand many had to be held at much bigger venues, often at Macalester College or Central Presbyterian Church in downtown St. Paul. By the mid-1990s the bookstore routinely offered over 200 events per year. More than 1,700 authors made Hungry Mind appearances between 1978 and 2004.

In 1985 Unowsky, with Bart Schneider as editor, launched the Hungry Mind Review, in time a quarterly journal of book reviews, author interviews, and original artwork. Like the author appearances, the Review employed local, regional, and nationally prominent writers; it also made a point of supporting local presses, such as Milkweed Editions, based in Minneapolis. In its first decade or so it was distributed solely through independent bookstores; it eventually achieved a circulation estimated at 50,000. In 1994 Unowsky and a small team of investors and collaborators created the Hungry Mind Press, which specialized in publishing out-of-print titles they believed had been overlooked by the big publishing houses. Though Unowsky denied ever having a business plan, the effect was to create a Twin Cities literary ecosystem with the Hungry Mind at its center.

All of these ventures took place in the context of turmoil in the bookselling trade, most notably the rise of enormous chains such as B. Dalton (based in Minneapolis), Barnes & Noble, Waldenbooks, and Borders, and large independent stores in the Twin Cities, such as Gringolet, Baxter’s (both Minneapolis), and Odegard’s (Minneapolis and St. Paul). The Hungry Mind outlasted almost all the independents, but the competition was intense, and made worse by the appearance of the online bookseller Amazon in 1995.

By the late 1990s the Hungry Mind was selling more books than ever, holding more events, employing more people—up to fifty, with health insurance—and losing money. It secured a temporary lifeline when a California publisher bought the Hungry Mind name; Unowsky then renamed his enterprises Ruminator. Despite the losses, in 2001 he opened a second store at Open Book, a book arts hub in downtown Minneapolis. This proved to be a fateful error.

The Minneapolis store lost money from the first and closed in 2003, at which time Unowsky owed Macalester College, which had financed his ventures since 1972, over $600,000. He tried frantically to erase the debt in late 2003 and early 2004, to no avail. The bookstore closed in July of that year, and Unowsky went into bankruptcy. The Ruminator Press had already ceased to publish; Ruminator Review lasted a few months longer.