Book Review

(Photo by Katherine Knowles from New York's "Greenwich Village" by Edmund T. Delaney) THE EIGHTH STREET BOOKSHOP IN ITS PRIME: Greenwich Village's Famous Bookstore circa 1965. You can see the doorway Delmore Schwartz lumbered through one memorable evening. There were usually three of us at the front counter. The stool is no doubt like the one Eli Wilentz sat on in the days when he and his brother Ted watched over the city's busiest and most exciting literary bookshop. The remainders on the right are priced to sell.

The Used Book Mystique, Part Two: Bookstore Tales

Stuart Mitchner

When this issue appears, we will be midway through the set-up of this Friday’s Friends of the Princeton Public Library Book Sale. My excuse for dwelling on the subject of old books is simple enough: it’s dwelling on me, I’m dwelling in it; my back will soon be aching; so will my feet, and since my one enduring sports obsession, the St. Louis Cardinals, will be battling the Mets on Wednesday (and maybe Thursday), we’ll have game six of the NLCS on the big Community Room screen as we arrange the book tables in preparation for Friday’s noontime rush.

Baseball actually figured in the first great used book find of my life, in a Fourth Avenue bookstore much like the one where I found A Figure in Hiding, the Hardy Boys volume I mentioned in last week’s column. That was essentially a book to be read, or what book dealers would describe as “a reading copy.” The tome I pulled down from a none too steady shelf in that murky, crowded, cluttered firetrap felt as heavy as an atlas. It had dull red covers, and I’m not sure whether the title was Who’s Who in Baseball or The 1932 Baseball Yearbook. The title didn’t matter. Here was the essence of Old Book: it had all the dimensions, the weight, the size, the timeworn, book-of-the-ages aura wafting up at you, warming your face as you opened it. The only other treasure of similar heft that ever came my way was a massive edition of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner with the Gustave Doré illustrations that I found at the Old York Bookshop in New Brunswick, a book big enough to attach a sail to and sail away on. That was decades later, however. When I opened the baseball annual what I found was beyond anything I could have imagined. Here were glossy sepia portraits of the great players of the day, one to a page: Babe Ruth all glossy gravitas in suit and tie, full face, hair slicked back; Lou Gehrig in soft focus, his features glowing with the mellow lighting used for movie stars; Jimmie Foxx and Rogers Hornsby primed and pomaded; Dizzy Dean and his Gas House Gang teammate Pepper Martin, the Wild Hoss of the Osage, looking downright austere and academic, like faculty members in a prep school yearbook.

The Ideal Book Dealer

I mentioned the Old York, which was located on Easton Avenue near the Rutgers campus from 1968 until 1983. The owner, John Socia, who died about five years ago, was the antithesis of the negative stereotype of the dealers who descend on the book tables with flying elbows at the Bryn Mawr free-for-alls, and even, to a lesser extent, at our relatively sedate but increasingly more competitive 12 to 2 Friday previews. John truly loved books, had a gift for finding good ones, and didn’t have an ungenerous or aggressive bone in his body. Though the Old York lacked the dusky depths of a Fourth Avenue shop, it was a wonderful store with a rich, fluid stock. John’s two brothers were also used book dealers, one in Scranton, the other in Hastings-on-Hudson. When he was growing up, John used to get taken along to used bookstores in Philadelphia by his father, a Sicilian immigrant who apparently simultaneously discovered the joys of reading and developed a passion for books while learning the English language. John was my ideal: the unbookish bookman. No airs, no self-conscious literary chat (he loved James Joyce the way I love the St. Louis Cardinals), no boasting of finding a treasure and making a huge profit — which he never did because he priced everything so fairly. Other dealers pillaged his stock. Years after he’d retired from the book business and right up to the end of his life, John enjoyed coming to our library sales.

Area Stores

My ideal bookshop evolved out of my memory of the cozy but cavernous places where I found the Hardy Boys and the aforementioned baseball yearbook. In such a store it’s always twilight or full night. No sunshine allowed, unless it’s just a glimmer of everyday reality on the other side of a dusty front window. The preferable weather is dampish: British, for lack of a better adjective. Book adventures in England always had the flavor of English weather. Right now I know of no shops in New York that offer that sort of atmosphere. The Strand, which has been functioning since 1927, is too big and busy. The Skyline on 18th Street comes closer. I found hints of the requisite duskiness not all that long ago in the depths of W.H. Allen’s in Philadelphia, but by now I’m afraid that those creaky, dimly lit chambers may no longer be open to the public.

Closer to home, there’s the Cranbury Book Worm, which my wife and I discovered one foggy Sunday afternoon in 1975 (our first purchase was a radiantly decrepit copy of Om: The Secret of Ahbor Valley; the greatest find was a 7-volume 1856 edition of Coleridge’s Works). The Book Worm lost some of its charisma when fire inspectors forced the closing of the book-dense basement. Then there’s Princeton’s own Micawber Books, which was launched by Logan Fox (a Strand alumnus) back in the early 1980s. I used to trade rare finds from garage and rummage sales for some of the treasures that seemed to be falling in Logan’s lap every week during the shop’s early years. Princeton’s longest-lived store was the Witherspoon (you can’t beat a subterranean bank vault for atmosphere), which donated the remainder of its stock to the library when it closed last year. You could even say that our 2005 sale was haunted by the ghostly remains of the Witherspoon.

A New York Tale

Back in the early 1990s there was a store on Greenwich Avenue where I once found a beat-up first edition of On the Road that had belonged to a minister in Newark. The shop was run by a married couple, obvious refugees from the 1960s Village scene Bob Dylan describes so well in Chronicles: Volume One. When I wandered into their store early one evening (a rainy evening at that) they told me I’d gotten in just before closing. What they meant was, they were closing for good. I was their last customer ever, although someone else was in the shop, definitely a New York character, wild-haired, down-and-out edgy in a grubby overcoat, possibly stoned or drunk or both. He and I soon got into the sort of bantering bookshop conversation every store owner has experienced at one time or another. He was doing his best to help me choose what would be the last purchase ever in that shop. “Try that one. That’s a good one. You could resell that like a shot.” One of the books he handed me was a literary journal featuring the work of Gregory Corso. “You can have it for ten bucks,” said Gregory Corso. “I’ll sign it for you.” He did and I bought it.

Greenwich Village’s Famous Bookstore

That image of a New York poet on the edge brought back another bookstore moment: a trenchcoated man with a tortured expression on his vaguely familiar face standing frozen on the threshhold of the original Eighth Street Bookshop when I was working there. I was at the cash register near the entrance next to Ted Wilentz, who, along with his brother Eli, owned the store. “That was Delmore Schwartz,” he told me, once the man had lurched into the street looking like the version of himself (“clumsy and lumbering here and there/the central ton of every place”) in his great poem, “The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me.”

The Eighth Street was my ideal of a “new” bookstore. In its prime, the Gotham Book Mart uptown may have been more exotic, if only for its legendary basement of rarities and its walls crowded with framed photos of literary celebrities. But the Eighth Street had a rich stock of new, out-of-the-way titles and a knack for acquiring the most fascinating selection of remainders. Through their own imprint, Corinth Books, Ted and Eli were publishing early work by Ginsberg and Kerouac and Diane DiPrima and books in the American Experience Series, including the one on my desk at this moment (a facsimile of Melville’s copy of Owen Chase’s Shipwreck of the Whaleship Essex ). The clientele in 1961 was unusual, to say the least: there was dapper Leroi Jones in a vested suit (I imagine him with spats and a walking stick, but that’s probably wishful thinking) before he morphed into Amiri Baraka. There was crestfallen, post-21 Questions-scandal Charles VanDoren; Allen Ginsberg, whom Ted brought upstairs to meet me one night when I was doing the accounts; Arthur Miller, who ordered the memoirs of Saint-Simon; and the cartoonist William Steig, who was hefty, hard of hearing, and looked very like one of his own tough-kid drawings. The sales staff was unusual, too. We had published novelists, a poet or two, a guy who wrote the introduction to the New Directions edition of Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and the grumpy, sallow-faced, ultimately companionable co-worker who insisted that everyone in the world was gay, including President Kennedy, and who eventually starred as Our Lady of the Docks in Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures.

Compared to the staff, the Wilentz brothers might seem almost normal. It would be hard to imagine two more opposite temperaments. Ted never stopped moving. He fidgeted standing still, a cigarillo forever in one hand while the other drummed the counter, his eyes darting around constantly. Everything he said to me, including the reference to Delmore Schwartz, was spoken out of the side of his mouth while his busy eyes made the rounds. Eli was a dour still-life by comparison. He would station himself on a stool with a good view of the entrance. Usually he would sit with his arms crossed and focus his hawk-like gaze on the area any shoplifter would have to pass through before safely emerging on to Eighth Street. How he managed to see everything that Ted saw without moving his eyes is one of nature’s mysteries. Eli was cool and Ted was hot, and apparently, the negative elements in that mixture finally exceeded the positive when the brothers became estranged and Eli took over the store.

Bookstore Beauty

If you want to see the most beautiful and unlikely of book dealers rent a copy of The Big Sleep, surely the only film noir that features two second-hand bookstores. One of them is a front clerked by a moll who goes “Duh” when a private eye disguised as a simpering bibliophile comes in asking about first editions with special points. But the shop clerked by Dorothy Malone is the real thing. She knows her books and she knows what to do when Humphrey Bogart walks through the door on a rainy afternoon.

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