Christopher Rohe first saw his wife, Jeannie Hoff, at Hyde Park’s Seminary Co-op.
“We met at a bookstore,” said Hoff. “Of course we did, right?”
For the past four decades, Rohe quietly shaped Chicago’s famously robust literary scene, largely behind the scenes, tracking down, curating and selling the words and ideas and stories that would fill the bookshelves and minds of generations of readers.
Rohe died last month at age 61, 10 months after being diagnosed with lung cancer.
“It’s a lot of knowledge lost,” said Ric Addy, Rohe’s longtime friend and the former owner of Shake Rattle and Read, the iconic used books and record store that closed in 2016 after 50 years in Uptown.
Rohe was one of the sons in Paul Rohe & Sons, Booksellers, the used bookstore that spent more than a decade at Clark Street and Belmont Avenue before relocating to several different Lakeview storefronts, always trying to outrun the twin threats of big-box Goliaths and online retailers.
“There are fewer readers nowadays than there were 20 years ago,” Paul Rohe told the Chicago Reader in 1997, upon the occasion of his family shop closing its doors for good. “And infinitely fewer than there were 40 years ago.”
The late Paul Rohe was a field editor at Random House who, with Lilette Crenshaw Rohe, a Paris-born ballet dancer, raised Chris and his younger brother Gregory in Evanston. The couple surrounded their children with books and music and an appreciation and curiosity for the larger world.
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After Paul Rohe & Sons closed, Chris Rohe transitioned to selling books online, mostly through Amazon, eBay and Advanced Book Exchange.
“You’ve heard of the book, ‘A Gentle Madness?'” said Hoff, who married Rohe in 2010. “It was more than gentle. It was a deep, deep passion. Getting good books in people’s hands who could appreciate them, but also the thrill of the hunt — to find the rare book, the amazing book. Sometimes books would come back around that he sold in his store. He’d go to an estate sale and see his price markings in them. The idea of this worldwide circulation of an object — it was fascinating for him. Not for everybody, but definitely for him.”
Rohe was on the board of directors for the Midwest Antiquarian Booksellers Association, and he managed the group’s annual Chicago Book Fair at Plumbers Union Hall.
“He’d personally go around to bookstores all over the city and suburbs and put up flyers for it,” Addy said.
The work of feeding minds felt personal to him, Hoff said.
“He was just amazing to me,” she said. “He was really sick and walking around filling orders a week before he died. He’s got Kafka’s Diaries in his hand, ‘Will you give me a hand wrapping this?’ That kind of thing. He never stopped.”
Addy said Rohe taught him everything he knew about selecting and selling books and magazines. Before it became Shake Rattle and Read, Addy’s store was called the Book Box, a bookshop that his sister ran from 1966 to 1986. Addy’s background was in music sales, and Rohe helped him learn what to stock once he took over for his sister and transitioned the space to sell both music and books.
“I really didn’t know what I was doing at first,” Addy said. “If you brought a record to me, I could tell you about it right away. Chris was that way about books.”
Rohe taught Addy how to identify first editions, how to recognize famous authors’ pen names, how to find interviews with famous artists and history makers in magazines that Addy might otherwise overlook — Martin Luther King Jr.’s interview in Playboy, Norman Mailer in Esquire, Charlie Parker in Downbeat.
He taught Addy about Studs Terkel, Gabriel García Márquez, Nelson Algren, Raymond Chandler. He taught Addy how to sell books online when he could no longer maintain a bricks-and-mortar existence.
“He told me, ‘This is the future, you might as well hop on,'” Addy said.
Janet Wolf, Rohe’s sister, said her baby brother’s enthusiasm for learning was apparent from a young age. When Rohe was 13, Wolf, who is 16 years older, was living in Gilgil, Kenya, with her husband, who was researching Kenyan birds. Rohe came to live with them for two months.
“He was so curious and enthusiastic and appreciative of what Kenya was all about,” Wolf said. “He never once seemed bored. We didn’t have a TV. All we had was a little radio — no movies, no library. But he loved it. He learned how to recognize all the animals. To tell the impalas from the gazelles. A lot of Americans don’t ever bother to do that.”
Shortly after Rohe died, Hoff asked his siblings and a friend of hers to help write an obituary.
“One of my friends called him, ‘A quiet man with a wry sense of humor who was intellectual without pretension,'” Hoff said. “I thought that was right on. He was quiet. He grew up in a house full of intellectuals. But he was also kind of punk. He didn’t follow directions and he didn’t do what he was told by anybody. And I loved that.”
Rohe’s family is planning a memorial for the summer. They invite donations to be made in his honor to Openlands, an organization that protects natural and open spaces in northeastern Illinois and the surrounding region.
“I can’t get used to the idea that he’s not here,” Wolf said. “I keep thinking of things I need to ask him.”
He died too young and too quickly. But his sharp, curious mind and his generosity of spirit will live on, in the quiet, countless ways he fed Chicago’s boundless, hopeful appetite for books and all that they teach us, about ourselves and one another.
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