John Kuhner ’98 Builds Community With a Secondhand Bookstore in Ohio

When John Kuhner ’98 was a freshman studying classics at Princeton, he saw a problem: Textbooks were expensive, even if he could snag a used copy. At the end of the semester, he saw many of those same books in the trash.

As a sophomore, he coordinated with the student council of Mathey College to arrange a book swap. If a student had a book they didn’t need and wasn’t going to sell, they left it on a dining hall table for anyone to take — for free. Hundreds of books changed hands, making college a little bit more affordable for students like himself.

“The idea was to take books that people didn’t care about and get them to people who wanted them,” he says.

Since then, books have become Kuhner’s life. In 2023, he and his wife Catherine bought BookMarx, a bookstore in Steubenville, Ohio, where more than 25% of residents live in poverty.

“My whole life, I’ve been reading and familiarizing myself with lots and lots of books,” he says. “I find that familiarity helps me to help other people find the books that they’re looking for, and to find things that are quality to stock my shop.”

After graduating from Princeton, he did what a lot of classics graduates do: He taught Latin, English, and history in various high schools. But 10 years in the field burned him out. “I used to end the year about 20 pounds lighter than I began the year. I was always sick,” he says. So he chucked it all and moved to the Catskills in New York, getting a job in a plant nursery while living in a mountain cabin with no electricity and no running water.

“I just lived this very simple life,” he says. “I loved being in nature all the time and doing the Thoreau thing.”

When he got married, he and Catherine were content in the cabin, but it became more difficult and impractical once they had children. So they moved to Steubenville, where Catherine’s family is from.

There, Kuhner worked as a freelance writer but grew tired of only interacting with a screen most days. While his wife had connections in the area, he did not. Kuhner wanted to build community in a way that would also help Steubenville. That lead to buying BookMarx in 2023 from its owners, who were retiring.

Kuhner didn’t want to drastically change the mix of what the used bookstore sold. Steubenville has two Catholic colleges, so books by G.K. Chesterton, J.R.R. Tolkien, and C.S. Lewis are regular favorites. And the store already focused on classics, literature, theology, and philosophy, which are Kuhner’s favorites. While at Princeton, he took a course called the Humanities Sequence, “where we read authors from Homer to Habermas,” he says. “That course was by far and away my favorite class at Princeton.”

But Kuhner has also worked to expand the bookstore’s horizons, bringing more people into the store and downtown Steubenville. In 2023, he learned that one of the colleges was having a Tolkien conference, so he worked with organizers to make one of the conference’s social activities a reading at his store with the author of a book about Tolkien. It was the most profitable day the store’s ever had, and BookMarx partnered with the conference again in 2024. In January, Kuhner organized a Jane Austen regency ball at a local coffee house and roastery. All 150 tickets sold.

The store is evolving, too. Instead of relying on the sales of whatever used books walk in the door, he’s also added new books, including the works of James Baldwin, which he thinks local readers would enjoy. The store is also working with the Paideia Institute, a nonprofit that promotes the education and appreciation of classic languages, to sell Latin and Greek books.

Kuhner sees the bookstore as a way to build community and help Steubenville, which has suffered the fate of many Rust Belt towns. But he sees sprouts of life. In December, the downtown features a Nutcracker Village, the world’s largest collection of life-size nutcrackers; it has garnered press attention everywhere from People magazine to Forbes to The Washington Post. Kuhner wrote about it in a piece for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and made sure to extend the store’s hours to catch tourist traffic.

“We have so many problems. All these buildings are falling apart and the place really, really needs a lot more work,” he says. “However, in terms of a nice start, you can build on this. It’s definitely what I am hoping to achieve.”