| Larry Schwartz |
| “WISE men fish here,” says the sign above New York’s famous Gotham Book Mart, at 41 West 47th Street, Manhattan. Photographs on the walls inside show the store’s founder, Frances Steloff, with celebrated visitors such as Jean Cocteau (1948), Dylan Thomas (1952), Salvador Dali (1963), Marianne Moore (1967) and Anais Nin (1966), who once described Steloff as “hospitable to the unknown”. Steloff’s long-time manager, Philip Lyman, obliges with a quick tour. Here, a framed, cancelled cheque for $37.50 to D.H. Lawrence for copies of the then banned `Lady Chatterley’s Lover’; there, an unpublished 1940s group portrait for `Life’ featuring a clutch of literary heavies. Taken at one of the bookstore’s celebrated parties, the photograph includes the likes of Edith and Osbert Sitwell, Stephen Vincent Benet, Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Richard Eberhardt. Also in the photograph is Tennessee Williams, who had earlier lasted less than a day as a clerk at the Gotham because, as Steloff once put it, he “couldn’t get here on time in the morning and … wasn’t very good at wrapping packages”. Poets Allen Ginsberg, who still occasionally drops in and signs his books, and LeRoi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka) were more successful behind the Gotham counter. Though Steloff’s major interest was yoga and mysticism, she championed the literary avant-garde, promoting the likes of Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein before they found fame. The influential poet William Carlos Williams, was also welcomed there. “In those years … other stores were not carrying young writers,” Lyman says. Steloff sold books such as James Joyce’s `Ulysses’ and Henry Miller’s `Tropic of Cancer’ when they were not available elsewhere in the US. The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice frequented the shop and Steloff was taken to court in 1935 for selling, of all things, Andre Gide’s `If It Die’. “That was a ludicrous affair,” says Lyman, now 66 and semi-retired. Although Joyce never visited America, one of Steloff’s best-known parties was to launch his `Finnegans Wake’. Steloff was one of the founders of the James Joyce Society, which regularly meets at the Gotham. Joyce ordered books from the Gotham, even in the last year of his life. Canny enough to see commercial potential in banned books, Steloff was also smart enough to store signed books in her basement rather than return them to publishers. She could retrieve them later when their authors had found fame. According to Henry Miller’s biographer, Mary V. Dearborn, Steloff supplied the author with names of other sympathetic booksellers, helped him to gain advance orders to raise money to pay for new books and spread the word about where his works were available. Theodore Dreiser and H.L. Mencken once stumbled in drunk, then proceded to sign books, including the Bible, “compliments of the author”. John Updike says it’s his favorite North American bookstore and Bob Dylan has reputedly come by for arm-loads of books. Lyman has lost count. But there is said to be 250,000 or so books and 50,000 literary magazines in the Gotham’s premises. Signed and out-of-print books are to be found among its shelves of 20th-Century literature, film, theatre, art and philosophy. There is also a vast selection of small-press publications. Lyman remembers Frances Steloff, who lived in an apartment above the store until close to her death, aged 101, as “an immensely strong-minded person. No one ever got the better of her, to my knowledge”. The daughter of impoverished Russian migrants, she left school early and sold flowers on the streets of Saratoga Springs, in upstate New York, to bolster her father’s income as a dry-goods peddlar and itinerant rabbi. At 19, she came to New York, selling corsets in a Brooklyn department store before being transferred to the book department. This was like “giving a copy of Euclid to Isaac Newton”, `The New York Times’ noted in her obituary on 16April 1989. She opened her own shop on West 45th Street in 1920 in what was then a theatre district. Early customers included Eugene O’Neill, Rudolph Valentino and George and Ira Gershwin. “I first worked here in the summer vacation of the 1950s,” says Lyman. “I came back in 1959. I’ve been here ever since then. Now I’ve retired, I come in every other day.” Asked of his encounters with the famous, Lyman mentions T.S. Eliot, not immodestly though. “I shook his hand,” he says with a laugh. “She (Steloff) took him and his wife back and sat them down and had a long conversation. I shook his hand.” Lyman says: “For years we’ve had a tradition of having publication parties for new books of our kind. We had a party for every one of the Anais Nin diaries when they were published and usually we’d have a party for a new Tennessee Williams. “The walls here are lined with pictures from our parties … The publisher would arrange to have the publication party here. It was good publicity. It wasn’t a question of selling books. It’s a long tradition that goes back to the ’30s.” LYMAN says writers continue to “venerate this place”. He says that though there are now similar ventures (“I call them little Gothams”), he does not know of a comparable bookstore. Andreas Brown, the Gotham’s owner since 1967, once said of the store: “This genius-invalid we have to protect.” Lyman says Brown “was a customer for some years and she persuaded him to come in as the custodian. He runs the rare books department, appraises books and sells authors’ collections”. Brown, a literary archivist from California who has handled the estates of Truman Capote, Carson McCullers and S.J. Perelman, was away on business when I called. Reportedly he runs the Gotham with “a sort of cold-eyed impracticality”, sacrificing annual profits of up to 12 per cent by refusing to change its emphasis and stock the more commercial cookbooks, exercise manuals and so on. Since Brown took over, staff have checked browsers’ bags at the counter, one reporter noted. Frances Steloff, however, relied on a sign: “Attention shoplifters _ remember your karma.” The Sunday Age, 30-Aug-1992 |
Larry Schwartz Writer 