Thursday, April 18, 2002
Baseball and book collecting - a quirky picture
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
A young relative called, from Fenway Park, ecstatic with Spring and the beginning of the baseball season. He had spotted Chuck Knoblauch on the Kansas City Royals’ team, playing left field. It put me in a foul mood. What is it with the Yankees, needing more and more sullen high priced warriors, automatons conditioned to win, win, win. Our favorite players had quirks, personalities, we learned to suffer with them in their miseries and to recognize their rituals. The entire baseball fraternity has been reduced to ten rich and winning teams, the rest of the 30 being relegated to the roles of patsies and dupes, chopped meat for the stats of the mighty . Montreal and Minnesota will close up, no one goes to their games, or cares for such no-win home teams. The Yankees, LA and Atlanta buy up the talent and the rest can go on, developing and losing their players. Some equality, please!.
Want to take kids to the ball game? Bleacher seats are $8, top row is $15 and a family of four will spend $100 to $200 in the grandstand, with souvenirs, hot dogs and sodas, a big occasion. Major league baseball tries to sweeten ir, with special events, a Bat Night, when everyone under the age of 14 gets a free implement, or a Derek Jeter or Jason Giambi Night, with glossy pictures or other souvenirs handed out. Nevertheless, it is not the old time thing. You want to mention parking at the Stadium or Shea, okay, that’s another deterrent.
Clearly, the Great American Pastime has become a TV event. Or, has it? The Yankee Channel Yes has a dispute with Cablevision, about making it a premium channel. Currently the faithful can see some 50 games free on CBS. How many of them will pay $2 a month for the opportunity of viewing the balance of the 162 game schedule? Many. The greed of the sports and TV promoters is unlimited - just think of the hundreds of dollars Knicks fans pay - and the ticket buyers take it unflinchingly. Is it the pleasure of the game, which one can see at a sports bar for the price of a few expensive beers, or is it the prestige of having been there, in person? [Knicks management plays up the prestige, claiming a streak of sold-out games since February 1993, although thousands of seats stay empty during the current season. Even Woody Allen and Spike Lee skip games.] Or, it may just be love. Whatever the reason, a true afficionado pays for his quirky affection, in money, or in effort and ingenuity, to get close to his heroes, as the next story shows.
A friend who is the quintessential Yankee fan, has a subscription for four field-level tickets, close to the home plate. That’s $48 a seat, or $ 228 a game (including clubhouse privileges and waiter service at the seats) or over $8,000 a season of 81 home games. All for the pleasure of seeing few enjoyable events first-hand. How does this honest wage earner manage his quirky pleasure? Well, this is a shared subscription, and the owners have a network of Yankee lover friends, built over a period of years, who well before the season sign up to buy up the tickets for the games our stalwarts cannot attend personally. This is a major planning, apportionment and trading effort, requiring tact and diplomacy, or else the subscribers will be stuck for a substantial monetary loss. In the past the Yankee box office cooperated - the subscribers could send in, say, a dozen or so tickets for games missed, and they would be given an equivalent number of grandstand tickets for games that do not attract droves of paid customers. Our subscribers would then donate the tickets to a boy’s club or church and give some kids the opportunity for a rare pleasure. But no longer, Yankee management as grown tighter, and the fans must take their licks.
This is not to sneer at sports fans, operagoers and theater subscribers go through the same process. We all have to continue with feeding our pleasure requirements, or else the terrorists will win.
Here’s good news for those of us whose pleasure is to collect books. Marvin Mondlin, who has been buying book collections and estates for the Strand Book Store for decades, has written up (with author Ray Meador) his recollections of "Book Row America," the Fourth Avenue antiquarian booksellers, who, until the residential real estate boom below 14th Street put them out of business, could pursue their quirky low-profit trade - or hobby - in a communal environment. Of the two or three dozen establishments, you may remember the last of the large ones to go, Wilfred Pesky’s Schulte’s, now an antiques emporiun, near Grace Church, across from what used to be Biblo and Tannen’s and Sid Solomon’s Paragon. Some of us may also still remember Milt Applebaum’s Arcadia, and Sam Weiser’s (managed by a third-generation, specializing in the occult and still in full swing, up in Maine), who moved over to Broadway in the mid 1950s, as did the Strand..
Marvin’s will be the definitive history of the Book Row, brought up to date with the inclusion of a later generation, Glenn Horowitz, Timothy Johns and Steve Crowley. The mighty Strand, with its eight miles of bookshelves (it must be up to 16, the way they are expanding), is also there, the flagship, with a 3rd generation management moving in. You’ll read stories of the founder, Ben Bass.
The Book Row people were storybook characters There was the autocratic Walter Goldwater of Academy, often away playing tennis or keeping a benevolent eye over for the incunabula at the Widener library, up in Cambridge, while his man French took care or the shop. Bill French was a major expert in his own right, in African and African-American poetry and literature. On the other side of the coin, think of the Wawrovics brothers, Louis and Ernie (I knew the latter, in his basement shop on 14th Street and 1st Ave), the suitcase auction kings, who, after the packrat Collier brothers died in 1947, acquired their houseful of papers on 128th Street. There’s a quirky novelty play, "The Dazzle,"by Richard Greenberg, about the recluse Langley and Homer Colliers, at the Roundabout’s Gramercy on 23rd Street.
The Mondlin & Meador book is still in search of a publisher. If you are quirky enough to get behind it, get in touch with their venerable literary agents, Lescher & Lescher, Ltd., in the heart of the old Book Row, and a lot of book lovers will be indebted to you. Not quite as many of them as there are baseball fans; on the other hand, they will have to pay less for their lasting pleasure than the ball game enthusiast pays for a single seat in back of the dugout in Yankee Stadium.
Wally, afeared of the fate of the Collier brothers, is currently. digging his way out of an accumulation of old newspapers, ready for recycling (papers, that is). Anything to stop watching the news.
A young relative called, from Fenway Park, ecstatic with Spring and the beginning of the baseball season. He had spotted Chuck Knoblauch on the Kansas City Royals’ team, playing left field. It put me in a foul mood. What is it with the Yankees, needing more and more sullen high priced warriors, automatons conditioned to win, win, win. Our favorite players had quirks, personalities, we learned to suffer with them in their miseries and to recognize their rituals. The entire baseball fraternity has been reduced to ten rich and winning teams, the rest of the 30 being relegated to the roles of patsies and dupes, chopped meat for the stats of the mighty . Montreal and Minnesota will close up, no one goes to their games, or cares for such no-win home teams. The Yankees, LA and Atlanta buy up the talent and the rest can go on, developing and losing their players. Some equality, please!.
Want to take kids to the ball game? Bleacher seats are $8, top row is $15 and a family of four will spend $100 to $200 in the grandstand, with souvenirs, hot dogs and sodas, a big occasion. Major league baseball tries to sweeten ir, with special events, a Bat Night, when everyone under the age of 14 gets a free implement, or a Derek Jeter or Jason Giambi Night, with glossy pictures or other souvenirs handed out. Nevertheless, it is not the old time thing. You want to mention parking at the Stadium or Shea, okay, that’s another deterrent.
Clearly, the Great American Pastime has become a TV event. Or, has it? The Yankee Channel Yes has a dispute with Cablevision, about making it a premium channel. Currently the faithful can see some 50 games free on CBS. How many of them will pay $2 a month for the opportunity of viewing the balance of the 162 game schedule? Many. The greed of the sports and TV promoters is unlimited - just think of the hundreds of dollars Knicks fans pay - and the ticket buyers take it unflinchingly. Is it the pleasure of the game, which one can see at a sports bar for the price of a few expensive beers, or is it the prestige of having been there, in person? [Knicks management plays up the prestige, claiming a streak of sold-out games since February 1993, although thousands of seats stay empty during the current season. Even Woody Allen and Spike Lee skip games.] Or, it may just be love. Whatever the reason, a true afficionado pays for his quirky affection, in money, or in effort and ingenuity, to get close to his heroes, as the next story shows.
A friend who is the quintessential Yankee fan, has a subscription for four field-level tickets, close to the home plate. That’s $48 a seat, or $ 228 a game (including clubhouse privileges and waiter service at the seats) or over $8,000 a season of 81 home games. All for the pleasure of seeing few enjoyable events first-hand. How does this honest wage earner manage his quirky pleasure? Well, this is a shared subscription, and the owners have a network of Yankee lover friends, built over a period of years, who well before the season sign up to buy up the tickets for the games our stalwarts cannot attend personally. This is a major planning, apportionment and trading effort, requiring tact and diplomacy, or else the subscribers will be stuck for a substantial monetary loss. In the past the Yankee box office cooperated - the subscribers could send in, say, a dozen or so tickets for games missed, and they would be given an equivalent number of grandstand tickets for games that do not attract droves of paid customers. Our subscribers would then donate the tickets to a boy’s club or church and give some kids the opportunity for a rare pleasure. But no longer, Yankee management as grown tighter, and the fans must take their licks.
This is not to sneer at sports fans, operagoers and theater subscribers go through the same process. We all have to continue with feeding our pleasure requirements, or else the terrorists will win.
Here’s good news for those of us whose pleasure is to collect books. Marvin Mondlin, who has been buying book collections and estates for the Strand Book Store for decades, has written up (with author Ray Meador) his recollections of "Book Row America," the Fourth Avenue antiquarian booksellers, who, until the residential real estate boom below 14th Street put them out of business, could pursue their quirky low-profit trade - or hobby - in a communal environment. Of the two or three dozen establishments, you may remember the last of the large ones to go, Wilfred Pesky’s Schulte’s, now an antiques emporiun, near Grace Church, across from what used to be Biblo and Tannen’s and Sid Solomon’s Paragon. Some of us may also still remember Milt Applebaum’s Arcadia, and Sam Weiser’s (managed by a third-generation, specializing in the occult and still in full swing, up in Maine), who moved over to Broadway in the mid 1950s, as did the Strand..
Marvin’s will be the definitive history of the Book Row, brought up to date with the inclusion of a later generation, Glenn Horowitz, Timothy Johns and Steve Crowley. The mighty Strand, with its eight miles of bookshelves (it must be up to 16, the way they are expanding), is also there, the flagship, with a 3rd generation management moving in. You’ll read stories of the founder, Ben Bass.
The Book Row people were storybook characters There was the autocratic Walter Goldwater of Academy, often away playing tennis or keeping a benevolent eye over for the incunabula at the Widener library, up in Cambridge, while his man French took care or the shop. Bill French was a major expert in his own right, in African and African-American poetry and literature. On the other side of the coin, think of the Wawrovics brothers, Louis and Ernie (I knew the latter, in his basement shop on 14th Street and 1st Ave), the suitcase auction kings, who, after the packrat Collier brothers died in 1947, acquired their houseful of papers on 128th Street. There’s a quirky novelty play, "The Dazzle,"by Richard Greenberg, about the recluse Langley and Homer Colliers, at the Roundabout’s Gramercy on 23rd Street.
The Mondlin & Meador book is still in search of a publisher. If you are quirky enough to get behind it, get in touch with their venerable literary agents, Lescher & Lescher, Ltd., in the heart of the old Book Row, and a lot of book lovers will be indebted to you. Not quite as many of them as there are baseball fans; on the other hand, they will have to pay less for their lasting pleasure than the ball game enthusiast pays for a single seat in back of the dugout in Yankee Stadium.
Wally, afeared of the fate of the Collier brothers, is currently. digging his way out of an accumulation of old newspapers, ready for recycling (papers, that is). Anything to stop watching the news.
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 5:46 PM 
