Louisville’s lost bookstore with a tie to Kurt Vonnegut

Hi Louisville, Editor Declan here. I don’t know about you, but I always love hearing Louisville mentioned in media, whether it’s a passing reference in a TV show or a random line in a book. The latter is what I found when reading Kurt Vonnegut’s 1997 novel “Timequake,” which contains two references to a relative of Vonnegut’s named Kerfuit Stewart running a bookstore here in Derby City. If you’ve read “Timequake,” you’ll understand my trepidation in believing that such a person ever existed — the book wavers between fiction and non so much that you really feel like you’ve been through a timequake yourself. But a bit of research — and some help from readers like you — helped me discover that a Kerfoot Stewart really did live here in Louisville, really did run a bookstore, and really was a relative of Indianapolis’s own Kurt Vonnegut. William Kerfoot Stewart, born in 1875 in Marion, Indiana, married Ella Nannette Vonnegut in 1903. Ella Nannette, born in 1879…..

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