CHICAGO — In the early 1930s, Ralph Newman was walking through the Near North Side when he noticed a bookstore going out of business. He had left Northwestern University after a semester to play minor league baseball in the Southwest — only to be injured and leave baseball. He was in his 20s when he returned to Chicago. He was hunting for new opportunities when he decided he would sell books. He got a loan and bought out the stock of the closing store. One of his regulars became poet Carl Sandburg, then working on a four-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln’s Civil War years. They became close …
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