Mills Building (1897)

Throughout the 1890s, William Doxey’s employee Paul Elder watched and learned. By 1897 Elder decided that he had learned enough to strike out on his own. In December he became an independent publisher’s agent, and opened a one-room bookshop on the second floor of the Mills Building. An advertising card from this period offers an ‘installment library,’ where the reader could collect, one book per month, the entire works of Shakespeare or Dickens. More importantly, this room was almost certainly used to cement Elder’s new partnership with Morgan Shepard, and to plan a new store on Post St.