The Magic of Bookshops

Last November, I received a gift from Susan Fifer-Canby—a dear friend and fellow book lover.  We became friends during the summers and years when Kit and I worked at National Geographic and she was the Society’s head librarian.  If I needed a book, she’d send it to my work carrel on a cart that same day. We had a Nebraska connection from way back, but that is another story.  As with a good book, there is always a story beneath the story that leads both into the past and reveals a path to the future.

Susan’s gift was a copy of The Bookshop:  A History of the American Bookstore by Evan Friss. The note inside read “Had to buy for you.  Enjoy.  Hugs Susan.”  What is often the case for me regarding books I want to begin is this.  I arrange them behind me on a shelf along the back of the couch, and begin reading a book when it speaks to me.  Sometimes life gets in the way, but this time it was a whimsical postcard of three yellow cats relaxing in a bookcase that finally had me reach over my head and bring Susan’s book to my lap. 

In this fascinating book, the author offers a look at the central place bookshops and book sellers play in America’s cultural life.  The story opens with a history of Benjamin Franklin’s first bookstore in Philadelphia and takes the reader to a range of booksellers including Chicago’s Marshall Field & Company, Manhattan’s Gotham Book Mart and the Strand, specialty stores, sidewalk used book sellers, Barnes & Noble, Amazon Books, and Parnassus Books—an independent bookstore cofounded by bestselling author Ann Patchett in 2011.

Randomly opening the book, I found myself in New York City where past explorations of Manhattan’s geographic and cultural districts in the 1990s  as well as an article in the New York Times in 2001 brought back memories of the old Gotham Book  Mart that I’d recorded in my travel notes three decades ago.                                                                                

“The sign above an innocuous stairwell at 41 West 47th Street in NYC once read ‘Wise Men Fish Here.’  Here, if you took the bait, was the Gotham Book Mart—a jumble of books literally tucked down and within a frenetic world of Hassidic Jewish diamond traders and discount jewelry marts.  Frances Steloff founded the original Gotham on West 45th Street in 1920, then moved it in 1946 to the location I was visiting that day in the heart of Manhattan’s Diamond District.  Serious book lovers and browsers alike have frequented its quirky cramped quarters filled with piles of books and sleepy yellow cats named after writers ever since. 

“Sadly, the Old Gotham is no more.  A headline in the July 24, 2001,  New York Times read ‘Literary Fishing Hole Gets a For-Sale Sign:  Bookshop Seeking Less Chaotic Home.’  Reading the article, I was saddened to learn that the five-story building was being sold.  It’s current owner Andreas Brown wanted to move the Gotham to more spacious quarters so customers could browse without having to move four boxes to get to a shelf. What will be missed most are the ghosts of literati who over the years had turned the Gotham into an informal clubhouse of writers and people in the performing arts, as well as that of Ms. Steloff who lived in an apartment on the third floor after selling the business to Andreas Brown.”

Reading the full history of the Gotham Book Mart in Evan Friss’s book, I learned that Frances  Steloff died at 101 years old in April of 1989.  Brown sold the building for $7.2 million in 2004, relocating a final time to East Forty-Sixth Street, but it had never been the same after Steloff died.  In the spring of 2007, its inventory from the previous eighty-seven years went up for auction and its doors closed a final time.

Frances Steloff was a legend and her revered book mart played a unique role the lives of her customers, readers and writers like James Joyce, Edith Sitwell and her brother Osbert Sitwell, Henry Miller, Tennessee Williams, T.S. Eliot, Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg and Patti Smith during the lifetime of her shop.  Having read her backstory that traces her fascinating career as a bookseller, I’ve learned that my friend Susan’s gift reflects Steloff’s uncanny ability to connect customers in search of a book they didn’t know they needed with the perfect book from her collection.

“Certainly,” Friss writes, “she had a knack for putting the right book into the right hands at just the right time.”