Larry McMurtry on the Golden Age of Books

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SundayReview
Opinion

Lost Booksellers of New York

By LARRY McMURTRYMAY 10, 2014

IN the fall of 1965, I arrived in New York City, flush with somebody else’s oil money, to purchase books for a bookshop I was managing in Houston. The shop was called the Bookman and had several eccentric features: Our safe was the boll of a Louisiana gum tree; there was a room full of rare tobaccos, though smoking was forbidden; and there was even a young Asian man to serve sherry to such bewildered hicks as straggled in from time to time.

What we didn’t have were books, which was why I was in New York in autumn, walking up some dusty stairs to the famous Seven Gables Bookshop, managed then by Michael Papantonio and John S. Van E. Kohn, two of the most respected antiquarian booksellers of their time.

Back then, single-page printed ads bound inside the covers of books, promoting other books by the same publisher, were thought to establish the priority and value of that edition. But we at the Bookman discovered they had no connection whatsoever to value when, some years later, I stupidly sold these same gentlemen a beautiful copy of Thoreau’s “Walden” for a mere $12, because I thought the ads placed inside the covers mattered.

“Oh, we don’t pay attention to the ads,” Mr. Kohn said to me. Live and learn.

From the Seven Gables, I strolled down the street to the famous Gotham Book Mart, where a sign hung outside the store announced, “Wise Men Fish Here.” Frances Steloff, still the owner and in her 70s, was up on a ladder, pricing works on the occult; she never came down while I was present, and she soon sold the Gotham to a young Californian named Andreas Brown.

I imagine Andreas thought that if he bought the Gotham, he would acquire it, or at least acquire its aura. But Miss Steloff lived to a great age, and so did her grip on its aura. But those battles, if there were battles, were fought long ago. Frances lived nearly a quarter-century after she sold the store and died in 1989 at 101. The Gotham is now gone.

The other powerful woman on the New York book scene at that time was the redoubtable Marguerite Cohn, of the House of Books Ltd., the first New York bookseller to focus on the condition of the books she sold and of the collections she built. Margie, as her friends called her, was explosive. I believe she once flung a copy of “Three Stories and Ten Poems” at someone: her husband, who was Hemingway’s first bibliographer; one of her husband’s mistresses; or Edmund Wilson. The record is not clear, but the book is currently worth maybe $75,000.

Margie, on a buying trip to London, looked the wrong way, stepped off a curb and was killed by a truck. She may have had more disciples in the trade than any other dealer, the most impressive perhaps being Peter B. Howard of Serendipity Books in Berkeley, Calif. Both shop and shopkeeper are now gone.
Readers who enjoyed McMurtry's reminiscences here should rush to get his two excellent memoirs on the subject: "Literary Life, and "Books".
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I next visited the Carnegie Book Shop, run by the amazing David Kirschenbaum, 80 years a bookseller in Manhattan. He took over his father’s book cart at the age of 8 and kept on trucking for most of the century. Across his desk passed some of the most notable books to be traded in recent times, including George Washington’s personal copy of “The Federalist.” The father of our country was also a reader, though that particular copy from his library had been in and out of the trade for nearly 100 years.
My own first purchase from the Carnegie Book Shop was a 57-volume collection of the works of Maurice Baring, the author of a once famous commonplace book titled “Have You Anything to Declare?” Baring wrote a little of everything: novels, reportage, satire, trivia. Texans who frequented my bookstore proved not keen on Maurice Baring, but I enjoy him and have even improved my own collection a bit.
From the Carnegie, I then traveled downtown to Dauber & Pine, to the Strand, to the original Barnes & Noble, and briefly to the Jersey suburbs, haunt of the accomplished book scout Ike Brussel, who claimed to be the last of the great scouts, though he wasn’t.

I am glad I got to glimpse the legendary booksellers from this splendid generation. They were beginning to thin out even as I arrived. The Argosy Book Store and the Strand are still operating, but most of the rest are gone, felled not by the Internet, but merely by scoundrel time. Here is a brief honor roll of bookshops now vanished: the Seven Gables Bookshop; House of Books Ltd.; Scribner’s; the Gotham Book Mart; the Carnegie Book Shop; Dauber & Pine; the Eberstadt Brothers; University Place Book Shop; House of El Dieff; and Parnassus Books.

I was only in this Elysium for two days in 1965, but I was drawn back many, many times since and still go back, though now I feel as if I am visiting a city of ghosts.