(click to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Aug. 7, 2025
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on August 10, 2025

For 40 years, Pike Place Market newsstand let us read all about it

By Jean Sherrard

We know of at least one canary that thrived in a coal mine against the odds. “From the start,” says Lee Lauckhart, now 84, “everyone tried to convince me print media was doomed.”

For 40 years, however, he ignored the naysayers, owning and operating “Read All About It,” his beloved newsstand in the Pike Place Market, beginning in 1979.

“Every day, we’d see dozens of regulars who became good friends,” he recalls warmly, singling out longtime

co-workers for special praise. “We were just like family.”

Born in Seattle, Lauckhart graduated from the University of Washington in 1968, signing on with Thurston County as a “registered sanitarian” before joining the “back to the land” movement: “I spent four years as a Snohomish dirt farmer.”

Stints selling newspapers in New York’s Gramercy Park then driving taxis in Seattle “were pretty nip and tuck,” he says. Then one of his cab fares offered him a job making “horseshoe nail” jewelry in the Pike Place Market. It felt like coming home.

Just divorced, he found housing for himself and his young daughter in the Market’s newly renovated Leland Hotel, “the one with the ‘Meet the Producers’ sign on it,” Lauckhart recalls.

In 1979, after four years as a “crafty,” he had a lightbulb moment. Friend and longtime newspaper hawker Sebi Nahmias had a coveted license to sell local dailies from his stand at First and Pike.

Lauckhart, then in his late 30s, made Nahmias an offer:

that together they open a general-interest newsstand in the Market offering publications from around the world. Soon joined by partner Steve Dunnington, they comprised an irrepressible entrepreneurial trio.

“Read All About It” opened Oct. 25, 1979, on a 10-by-30-foot pitch in the Market’s southeast corner.

The newsstand was an unqualified success — and its location didn’t disappoint. “First and Pike,” Lauckhart says, “was the busiest intersection in the Pacific Northwest.”

A slew of innovations followed. The partners arranged for daily New York Times deliveries (before dawn each

morning via Flying Tiger Airlines) while negotiating contracts with newspaper and magazine publishers across the globe.

After four decades, however, the final curtain. Thousands of newspapers had been shuttered, writing the final epitaph for purveyors of print media.

Lauckhart, by then the sole owner, stubbornly held on as a matter of principle. For 10 years, he paid employees out of the newsstand’s dwindling profits while surviving solely on Social Security.

On Dec. 31, 2019, the “Read All About It” canary, one of the last of its kind, finally sang its swan song.

WEB EXTRAS

For our narrated 360 degree video, captured on location in Pike Place Market, click here.

Billy King, noted NW muralist — once voted Mayor of the Market– is a longtime pal of Lee Lauckhart’s. He created the print of “Read All About It” featured above.

When we prepared this column, Billy was hard at work restoring a mural painted years ago for Maximilien, a French restaurant in the Market. Check out a few pix of Billy at work:

Finally, Lee Lauckhart’s favorite photo of the newsstand in situ, taken for a now-defunct rag called Endless Vacation.