In 1879, René Wiener took over the family bookshop and stationer's shop, previously run by his father Lucien and grandfather Léon, at 53 rue des Dominicains in Nancy.

From 1885 onwards, every All Saints' Day, Wiener organised an exhibition in his shop window that was much admired by the people of Nancy. He invited artist friends such as Victor Prouvé, Camille Martin, Émile Friant, Ernest Bussière, Louis Hestaux and Hokkai Takashima, among others. He sometimes introduced new techniques, such as pyrography on wood in 1891.

A designer and creator of ex-libris and monograms, Wiener also published a number of works, including L'Art à Nancy in 1882 by his cousin Roger Marx, a famous art critic and future Inspector General of Museums at the Ministry of Culture.  The shop was also the home of the magazine Nancy artiste (which became La Lorraine artiste in 1888), a journal devoted to art in Lorraine and which, in particular, disseminated the ideas of the École de Nancy.

René Wiener achieved international fame in bookbinding. In 1893, at the Salon de la Société nationale des Beaux-Arts, he presented eight bookbindings created in collaboration with Victor Prouvé and Camille Martin. Admired and criticised, these bindings were the first recognition of a “école" lorraine of decorative art. The three artists made the bindings in the back shop of the Wiener shop, which had the raw materials and tools needed to produce them. But immediately after this success, a dispute arose between Wiener on the one hand, and Prouvé and Martin on the other, over the paternity of this new type of binding.

After this short collaboration, René Wiener called on other artists to provide him with binding boards. The Nancy artists Émile Friant, Jacques Gruber and Louis Guingot, and the Parisians Toulouse-Lautrec, Rudnicki and Auriol, among others, supplied the boards for his bindings.

In 1900, René Wiener sold his bookshop and the following year, following the early death of his only daughter, he gave up his bookbinding business. A great art lover and collector, in 1939 he bequeathed almost his entire collection to the Musée Historique Lorrain, including an extremely important collection of documents.