My Years at The Gotham Book Mart with Frances Steloff, Proprietor
Recollections about The Pantheon of Writers and Artists Who Passed Through Her Store and How I Became a Bookman
By Matthew Tannenbaum
Copyright © 2009 Matthew Tannenbaum
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I am very fortunate to have found Frances Steloff, founder of The Gotham Book Mart, when I was a very young man, and she turned me into the bookman that I have since become.
You don’t know, do you, when you walk into a place and meet someone for the first time, that that meeting is going to change your life forever. You don’t know it because you haven’t lived long enough yet to have had a life that is going to change.
So, how did I get to walk into that place and meet that someone?
Well, I met a girl once on the beach and we fell in love, but then we broke up and I joined the track team to run away from my heartache, and the track coach said I ran too slow to be on his team, so I went to the college newspaper office to write an expose of the rotten track coach, and I got caught up in the world of journalism, so caught up as a matter of fact that I forgot to graduate from the college, lost my deferment and got drafted into the army during the Vietnam War.
I joined the United States Navy to stay out of harm’s way and there I met a man who helped me convince my superior officers that I really wasn’t the right man for them, nor were they the right group for me, and the very day I went AWOL to prove my point I met a woman who told me, oh, if I liked so and so as an author, then I should really also read his girlfriend’s books and actually there’s one place in the world that has them both, and that’s the Gotham Book Mart in New York City.
One was always joining things in those days, and always meeting people also.
Now I should back up one tick and say that the Man in the Navy turned out to be a writer himself, and in fact, it was his story-telling skills that got us both out. Years later I was very proud to sell some of his books at my own store.
In the college journalism room my col-league was a young woman named Ann Beat-tie. We used to have long talks about The Lost Generation, Fitzgerald and Hemingway and The Roaring Twenties. While I went off and fought with the government which was fighting wars with other governments, Ann Beattie went off to graduate school and every day that I marched and plotted my way out, she sat down and wrote short stories about people in my situation, and by the time we met up again, in the spring of the bicentennial year, her first two published books were among the first ones I ordered from the publisher to begin my career as not only a bookseller, but a bookstore owner.
The writer I had met while marching was the one who got me beyond the Twenties and into the next generation of American expats, chief among them Henry Miller. His girlfriend was Anais Nin and their third pal was a ruddy Irishman who was born in Ceylon but who grew up in Greece, and his name was Lawrence Durrell and he wrote the most beautiful prose of them all. His Alexandria Quartet stands as one of the most lovely pieces of mid-century writing. The Navy man also introduced me to two more writers, couple of guys named Norman Mailer and Jack Kerouac.
Those two got me from the thirties into the forties, the fifties and the sixties. From then on I was going to have to be on my own.
I met Miss Steloff the first day I came to work at the Gotham. She was 84 years old and although she didn’t own the place anymore she still came downstairs to work every day. She lived on the third floor of the brownstone she owned there at 41 west 47th street, otherwise known as the “Diamond Street” in midtown Manhattan. Whatever else Miss Steloff wore during the day — and it was usually something simple and comfortable, for instance, always bedroom slippers — she also always wore an apron which she must have used like a handbag. I will always remember her change purse.
She assigned me two tasks right away. First was the awning. I started work there in the spring of 1971 and Miss Steloff was ever mindful of the sun’s harmful rays on the merchandise (the books) in the front window.
She taught me how to roll it down and when to roll it up. She didn’t like it open during a rainstorm. Its purpose was not to shield customers from the rain but to protect the books from the sun. About ten years ago I had two awnings placed over my two front windows at my store in Lenox, MA, and I stick to the same rules. Except there are times when I just want the sun on my own face of a summer afternoon and I let the books in the window play second fiddle to my own selfish needs.
My second task was a little less literary, or so it seemed at the time. Now that Miss Steloff and her pussycats belong to the ages maybe it’s time to put into perspective my daily afternoon chore.
Everybody called her Miss Steloff except for Andy Brown, a rare book dealer from Southern California who bought the shop from her a year or two before I arrived on the scene. He called her Frances and their relationship was as unique as it was predictable.
Frances was born on the last day of the calendar year in 1887 in Saratoga Springs, New York. She had one of those Charles Dickens childhoods: poor parents, early death of her mother, wicked stepmother, selling flowers to the summer tourists at the horse track during the short racing season, finally moving to the big city in her teens to seek her place in the sun.
She lived in Brooklyn and worked a variety of jobs before landing one in a department store. A gruff supervisor called her over one day and told her to get over to the magazine rack and see what she could do about it; the girl who was supposed to run it was always late or missing.
What follows is, of course, her life story, some of which I learned from her, some from the legends that naturally grew up around her. Some, on a very special cab ride that I’ll tell you about in a minute.
In 1957 when Miss Steloff was honored by friends for her 50 years in the book trade she said, “I shall never cease to be grateful for having been led into this most satisfying of all work.”
Back to the shop on West 47th street now, every day at 4 pm sharp (and she always called it a ‘shop,’ never a ‘store,’ she appeared from wherever she had been, upstairs in her apartment, or answering mail at the overstuffed roll top desk in her alcove, at the work station in the middle of the selling floor.
Phil Lyman always stood on the west corner of the counter at the north end of the long display case of new hardcover books. In the center stood Al Slotnick, who was somehow my immediate supervisor. And I and all the other younger clerks would gather at the east corner, either to await assignment or to stand ready to help a wandering customer.
Wherever else I might have been, at 4 o’clock sharp I was scheduled to meet Miss Steloff at the counter. I never failed at this task. I don’t recall her saying very much to me, but I want to say she smiled up at my face as she opened the small change purse in her apron pocket and took out what my memory wants to tell me is a quarter and a dime, 35 cents, and placed the coins in my hand. My job was to go around the corner to Sixth Avenue, one half block south to the little grocery and buy from the butcher way in the back of the store, thirty five cents worth of chicken livers, to give to Putsy and Putsy’s sister, these two giant white longhaired cats who were Miss Steloff’s constant companions.
If this doesn’t seem like much of an effort, you’ve got to remember that Miss Steloff once fired Tennessee Williams as a shipping clerk because he didn’t tie a parcel with twine correctly, or as correctly as she wanted it to be tied. Or so the story goes. There were lots of stories like that.
I met Tennessee Williams once, when he came into the store to see the newly published edition of the complete stories of Jane Bowles, to which he had contributed the introduction. He shook my hand, but only in response to my shaking his, I’m afraid.
I met other authors at the Gotham over the years I worked there, from 1971 through 1973, and I met others at the 92nd Street Y when I was the man at the table selling the books of the readers on the Monday night and Thursday night programs.
I have kept my notebooks and journals from those years and when I went to retrieve them the other night, for the very first time since I wrote down these stories, I couldn’t find them. The night I’m trying to remember was a Monday, I think. Elie Wiesel was presenting a talk on mystics and holy men in the Old Testament that night and Miss Steloff wanted to attend.
Usually I went by myself, packing up boxes of books, hauling them out to the sidewalk and hailing a cab that would take me up and across town to the Y. The deal was that the last one hired got this job. It was extra time, but you got to come in late the next day. Supposedly no seasoned worker wanted to do it, which is why it always fell to the new guy — but I loved it and I think I probably did a pretty good job. It was also a place for me to meet women, and that was all right for me, too!
But Frances (I’m taking liberties here, I know. . .) wanted to go and see Elie Wiesel, they were old friends, and so I was responsible for her as well as the night’s receipts. I walked over towards Fifth Avenue and found a cabbie willing to drive down the street and pull up in front of the shop while I went back in to get Miss Steloff, the boxes of books and the cash box as well. We got to the corner of Sixth Avenue, turned north and entered Central Park just around the time her stories about her early days in the city got interesting.
I’ll never forget the moment when the cabbie, stopped at a red light in the middle of the Park, turned around to the two of us in the back seat and said, “Lady, I’ve heard some good tales before, but yours are the best!” Then the light turned green and he sped off, carrying one bona fide old- timer and one very grateful-to-be-aboard new kid on the block.
After the reading, and after the reception after the reading that night, I went out and grabbed another cab to take Miss Steloff back to west 47th street, dropped off the books back at the shop and then took the hour long subway ride back to my apartment in Brooklyn, where I stayed up until 4 in the morning writing down everything I could remember about that night.
And now I can’t find the notebook!!
Among other writers and poets I met at the Y were Galway Kinnell, Anne Sexton, Archibald MacLeish, beat poet Allen Ginsberg and his father Louis, giving their first and maybe only joint poetry reading. Allen had recently broken his leg in some accident at his farm over in Cherry Valley, New York and so the Y had provided him with an overstuffed sofa to relax on while his father read, and which of course Louis used while Allen stood, with crutches, at the podium.
A very drunk and unruly fellow Beat poet Gregory Corso yelled at Allen early on during the reading, complaining that his comrade had sold out, gone straight, was reading ‘comfortable poetry’ now as opposed to his once radical stuff. The audience booed Gregory mercilessly, but Allen so sweetly admonished the crowd and invited his friend to sit up on the stage with him where he actually soothed his brow along with his temperament while the audience sat in awe of the impromptu performance.
I met Allen on the day he came in to sign copies of the posthumously published “Visions of Cody” by Jack Kerouac, for which he had written a beautiful elegy as introduction. He inscribed a copy for me, which I still have, dated December 14, 1972, Gotham Book Mart, my name, Happy Hanukkah, and a drawing of a flowerpot!
Archibald MacLeish told a story about James Joyce having such bad eyesight at the end of his life he took to writing a few words in large crayon letters on each page and posting them on the walls of the dining room.
J D Salinger was a guy I almost tripped over one morning. Repeatedly. There was this guy browsing the Sufi section, which was along a wall outside but near to Miss Steloff’s alcove. Frances never made it a secret that she didn’t read most of the authors whose work she championed. I wish now that I’d had the foresight to ask her why, but I think I know the reason anyhow.
Her kind of reading dealt mostly with the spiritual nature of our human lives. I think she instinctively realized what all good literature really aims at, in British novelist E. M. Forster’s words: “Only connect,” and she found her home in the esoteric back stories of most of the major religions, that only later came to be called “New Age” writing. There were authors in Miss Steloff’s alcove who are only now being reprinted for the first time since earlier in the twentieth century, even late in the nineteenth.
I’m thinking of Theosophy and Madame Blavatsky, Joel Goldsmith and Ernest Holmes and Emmet Fox who had all tapped into the older and more forgotten traditions that current movers and shakers had left behind.
Islam and its literary traditions took up more room than she had for it in her alcove, which was a kind of medieval church nave right off the center of the store, located, one might say, in the region of the heart chakra, and there was this guy there one morning, sitting on the floor in front of the Sufi books, just browsing and browsing.
The Sufis didn’t usually get so much attention and the floor right in front was a place that the shipments of books newly arrived would be placed. The browser interrupted the usual flow, but what could we do but work around him? It was only a few hours later when I was standing idly by the counter when Diane, one of the office clerks, came back to see Andy about some billing question and he, Andy, just happened to be walking from his office in the back and they met right where I was standing.
“Mr. Salinger left all his purchases here,” she said. “Does he want me to ship them?” And in a flash I realized that the guy I’d spent the morning unpacking boxes around was none other than the most famous recluse in twentieth century American letters.
Oh, man!
The Gotham Book Mart had an art gallery on the second floor and I used to eat my lunch-time sandwiches up there on a little round table set in the back. One day Andy came in from his morning up at Sotheby’s auction house. He came over to me and looked at my lunch and told me to go wash my hands, he had a treat to show me. It was the handwritten manuscript of D. H. Lawrence’s unpublished novel “Mr. Noon.”
My hands passed inspection and I opened the notebook to clear, neat and very small peacock blue ink, D. H. Lawrence’s final draft of “Mr. Noon.” Andy bought the notebook for a client of his and I remember that it wasn’t published for another ten years. By which time I had my own bookstore and I ordered copies of the book, in expensive university press prices and I never sold a single copy, but it was still my honor to carry such a book, whose noble birth I had somehow been a part of.
How come there isn’t some sort of angel or angelic representative to tell you when you’re in a sacred moment in your life? Wouldn’t that be some sort of cool afterlife job?
Or wait, isn’t that the job of the writers and poets and artists and actors and dancers and everybody whose good work Frances Steloff seemed to recognize, in her time.
She opened her shop on January 1, 1920. She was thirty seven years old. The War to End All Wars had just been fought, the old order was in shambles, and Miss Steloff started a literary salon in the middle of New York City in the most wonderful time of its own history. Her customers, then clients, then close, personal friends included Martha Graham, who came in one day after a matinee performance to buy a gift and stayed for years after as a loyal volunteer, especially at holiday gift wrapping time.
Included Christopher Morley, a writer and social commentator who gave us two timeless novels about the lost art of book-selling in the early twentieth century, “Parnassus on Wheels” and “The Haunted Bookshop”. Included Mencken and Dreiser who one day, after signing copies of their own books on the shelves, looked around for others. No one remembers who did the actual writing, but several copies of the Bible were inscribed, “with compliments of the author.”
Morley recommended Frances hire a beautiful young woman, wife of the puppeteer Bill Baird, her name was Evelyn and she stayed awhile before going off to marry the arctic explorer William Stefansson. I met her a few years ago when her autobiography was published and Evelyn Neff’s friends here in Richmond asked me to provide the books for the private reception.
There are marvelous photographs of writers like Morley and his contemporaries in the late nineteen-twenties in the out-in-the- courtyard Gotham Book Mart parties. By the time I got there, in the seventies, all the parties were in the evenings, upstairs in the gallery.
I remember being very excited that Anais Nin was coming, to sign copies of her latest diary. She was one of the authors who’d been presented to me as one of the reasons I’d like the place in the first place. I’d read all her published work and was as big a fan as anyone. I’d just bought my first camera, a Nikon, with inherited money. It was my first real investment purchase. It was an entry into possibilities of new worlds, and I asked Andy if it was okay for me to take pictures at the reception. He said it’d be fine, just as long as I didn’t interfere.
So, for a time, I took people’s coats and hats. I mingled among the crowd. I might have even served hor’s d’oeuvres for all I can recall. But then I was off on break and I went into the back room to retrieve my camera. I found Anais, talking to some friend about something or other. I didn’t know enough that I could listen to others at the same time I was trying to do something for myself, and I moved in to take the photo. Just as I was about to snap the picture Anais turned and faced me directly.