The Collection | The Mercantile Library

Skip to main content Skip to footer

Anyone can visit Opens Today at 9:00am

ask a librarian

In Pieces

All picks, past & present

In Pieces

Shakespeare

Our favorite adaptations

Shakespeare

Staff Picks

What are we reading?

Staff Picks

Art

Representing Africa in American art museums : a century of collecting and display

The moving image as public art : sidewalk spectators and modes of enchantment

The Black Trilogy

A field guide to American houses : the definitive guide to identifying and understanding America's domestic architecture

Turner : the extraordinary life and momentous times of J.M.W. Turner

Children

My wish for the world

Every leaf a hallelujah

Change sings : a children's anthem

Fly high! : the story of Bessie Coleman

Toy boat

Where the wild things are

Audiobooks

Brave Companions

Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life.

These precious days

Into thin air : a personal account of the Mount Everest disaster

Lincoln in the Bardo

Travel

The Gales of November The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald

Domestic manners of the Americans.

A marriage at sea : a true story of love, obsession, and shipwreck

Things Become Other Things

Into the ice : the Northwest Passage, the Polar Sun, and a 175-year-old mystery

Save Our Souls : The True Story of a Castaway Family, Treachery, and Murder

Oversized

What We Inherit Documenting Poverty in Southern Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Southern Indiana 1900-2024

Waffle House Vistas

A curious herbal : Elizabeth Blackwell's pioneering masterpiece of botanical art

When we see us : a century of Black figuration in painting

The lost subways of North America : a cartographic guide to the past, present, and what might have been

Picturing Frederick Douglass : an illustrated biography of the nineteenth century's most photographed American

Poetry

Resting bitch face : poems

Sonata mulattica : a life in five movements and a play : poems

Playlist for the Apocalypse : poems

Startlement : new and selected poems

The theory & practice of rivers

Falling fine : selected & new poems

Shakespeare

The book of William : how Shakespeare's first folio conquered the world

Reading Shakespeare's sonnets : a new commentary

North by Shakespeare : a rogue scholar's quest for the truth behind the Bard's work

Shakespeare in a divided America : what his plays tell us about our past and future

Shakespeare : the world as stage

Tyrant : Shakespeare on politics

Cincinnati

A history of manufactures in the Ohio Valley to the year 1860.

Redleg Memories the Reds of the Fifties and Sixties

Workers on the Edge: Work, Leisure, and Politics in Industrializing Cincinnati, 1788 - 1890

Cincinnati Christmas : history, tradition, food

Cincinnati in the Civil War : the union's queen city

Cincinnati Neighborhood Guidebook

About the Collection

With about 85,000 volumes, our collection of print, e-books, and audiobooks covers a broad spectrum of works and subjects for 187 years of organic growth reflecting shifting interests, tastes, and influences.

Join Today

Join the Library

Mon - Wed }9:00am – 5:30pm
Thu }9:00am – 7:00pm
Fri }9:00am – 5:30pm
Sat }10:00am – 3:00pm
Sun }Closed

Find Us

414 Walnut St. 11th Story
Cincinnati, OH 45202
(513) 621 - 0717

The Mercantile Library ©2026, All rights reserved. / Privacy Policy