When HG was young, New York was a city of bookstores. There was the grand Scribner’s on Fifth Avenue and Brentano’s, also a Fifth Avenue book landmark. The 8th Street Bookstore in the Village was where HG’s late, lamented friend Peter Alan Meyerson, the Hollywood comedy writer, worked after college. The Village was filled with bookstores catering to a variety of tastes: political, erotic, artistic, perverse. Fourth Avenue (later renamed Park Avenue South by the same pretentious vulgarians who dubbed Sixth Avenue as Avenue of the Americas) was lined with used bookstores. HG, sometimes joined by a young SJ, browsed their shelves on many happy days and bought the books that were the foundation of the HG/BSK library. HG’s favorite bookstore was the Gotham Book Mart at 41W. 47th Street. Frances “Fanny” Steloff opened it in 1920. Imperious and irascible, Fanny loved books and writers. It was a hangout for almost every literary luminary of the 20th Century. Delmore Schwartz, Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, W.H. Auden, Woody Allen, Stephen Spender and scores of other novelists, poets, critics and playwrights made it their hangout. There were poetry readings and novelists would often preview their works in progress. Fanny held parties for visiting literary figures from overseas (such as Osbert and Edith Sitwell). Fanny sold the shop in 1967 but continued to live in an apartment on the 3rd floor of the shop. She died in 1989 ate the age of 101. The shop (in a new space on W. 46th) closed in 2007, one of the last glorious independent, individualistic, eccentric New York bookstores. HG’s other favorite haunt was a small shop on 23rd Street that specialized in publishers’ overstock and cut rate art and design books. The owner, an erudite left wing gentleman, played Mozart and Bach on the shop’s sound system and gave HG steeps discounts on HG’s purchases of Skira and Abrams art books. HG recalled all of this as he read in the New York Times that New York bookstores are disappearing. Yes, Hitler burnt books and New York’s rapacious landlords are emulating him by eviscerating bookstores (and other irreplaceable neighborhood treasures) with outrageous rent demands. A young woman, the Times reported, who wanted to open a small bookstore on the Upper West Side, could find no space for less than $40,000 a month. New York has already lost more than a third of its bookstores. Surely there must be some sort of municipal government action (subsidy, etc.) to prevent the loss becoming even more dire. How can a city that calls itself the cultural and creative center of the world do nothing as its bookstores are driven out of business?
