Young’s Book Exchange is known as the first African-American bookstore. It was located at 135 West 135th Street in New York City.^[1] It was founded in 1915 by George Young,^[1] who was a Pullman porter during the 1900s, and became a bibliophile of African-American literature. His bookstore was known as the "Mecca of Literature" for African-American citizens.^[1] This bookstore housed approximately 8,000–10,000 volumes.^[2]

George Young was born in Virginia to two slaves recently freed. He later married Ellen Thomas Young and had a daughter, Sara Elizabeth Young.^[2] Young was a Pullman porter, hired to work on the railroads as a porter on sleeping cars. He was known to many different people all over the world, one friend being Frederick Douglass.^[2] Young was also the national treasurer of the John Brown Memorial Association and the superintendent of St. Mark's Methodist Episcopal Church Sunday School.^[2] Young died following a heart attack at the age of 65 in St. Luke's Hospital.^[2]

Books by African authors included the older Letters of Ignatius Sancho and the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa. Beside these were more recent treatises: Duse Mohamed, In the Land of the Pharaohs; Sol T. Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa; J. E. Casely Hayford, Ethiopia Unbound, Gold Coast Native Institutions, and The Truth About the West African Land Question;^[3] Dr. James Africanus Beale Horton, West African Countries and Peoples and A Vindication of the African Race; John Mensah Sarbah, Fanti Customary Laws; Bishop Samuel Adjai Crowther, Journal of an Expedition Up the Niger and Tshadda Rivers;^[3] Prof. Benjamin Brawley of Howard University, A Social History of the American Negro; George W. Williams, History of the Negro Race in America; William Wells Brown, The Black Man, His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements and The Rising Son;^[3] W. E. B. Du Bois, The Negro; Joel Augustus Rogers, Superman to Man.^[1]