Looking Ahead

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis






Here are some stories, to remind us of the days before this 21st Century, when Fourth Avenue below 14th Street, a low rent district then, was the Booksellers’ Row of America, with dozens of antiquarian booksellers active. Then the rents forced these low-income cultural oases to dry up. Fortunately for us, the largest, The Strand, survived and is thriving, giving book lovers a citadel to rally around. I was the junior member of a group of book scouts, traveling the East coast on Saturdays, visiting book dealers and looking for underpriced book rarities. “sleepers,” for fun and profit. In addition to Jack Brussel, S.R. Shapiro and Sonny Warshall, the regulars included Dr. Paul Cranefield (nobelist candidate for heart electronics research), Mozart expert Sam Orlinick and button manufacturer Milton Reissman, and children’s book collector, who later started the Victoria bookshop.



When my group of book scouts visited the East Coast bookstores on Saturdays, looking for hidden values, the dealers would study our choices carefully, and sometimes renege on price, claiming that the marked amounts for certain books should have been updated. This was not fair, but in order to keep our welcome green, we would submit to it.

Once my group of Saturday collectors went out of town to an advertised sale by a dealer who had bought a private library and was trying to get rid of the chaff. There were tables of 10 books for $5, and 10 books for $10, constantly being replenished. I was looking through the better books, when my eye caught a German title, "Koenig, Dame, Bube," by W. Nabokoff-Sirin, published by Ullstein in Berlin, 1930. This was certainly a find, an early book by the author who signed such later books as "Lolita" with the name of Nabokov. I carefully picked 19 other books at that table, including more foreign-language titles, all worth the money and some of them quite flashy, and walked over to the cash register. The dealer examined most of my purchases practically with a magnifying glass, and gleefully withdrew four titles, graciously letting me pay $16 without insisting that I pick four more items. Nabokov's second non-Russian book passed without a second glance.

My triumph was short-lived. When I happily examined my great find at home, it turned out that the front end-paper, the folded page which holds the binding and the book together, had been carefully detached. It probably held the author's inscription to a Lotte Brandenstein, whose ownership stamp is in the book, maybe too intimate to be left in the book when she disposed of it. All I had was merciless ribbing from my friends.



Some of our tales about inscribed books could get profane. As told by Ike Brussel, Jack’s brother, the great bibliographer of Anglo-American and American-Anglo first editions, it seems that Theodore Dreiser (also a neighbor, who once rented an office in the former Guardian building at 17th and PAS), who was a big chaser, would ask every woman he met to sleep with him, counting on the fame of his name and on the law of averages for a supply of bedmates . A young girl in the office of his British publisher succumbed, and at the end of the brief encounter humbly asked the great author to inscribe a copy of "Sister Carrie" for her, hoping that this would make a nice souvenir for later years. Dreiser inquired for her full name, and wrote:” To Mary Smith, in memory of a certain wall in London." He grandly handed her the book, she thanked him, and, upon reading the inscription, burst out in tears. But the author would not waste another copy on a short relationship, and the girl tore up the inscription. So Ike was told.



The T&V Country has been quite a literary center of NYC. In the former Guardia Life Building on corner of 17th and PAS (now W Hotel Union Square) besides housing Theodore Dreiser, there were the publishing offices housing T. Y. Crowell and E. P. Dutton (then a home of Winnie the Pooh and other A. A. Milne stuffed animals), and on the elevators one would meet, on occasion, Ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith, snapbrim-hatted Mickey Spillane, author of Mike Hammer detective series, poet Allen Ginsberg and his longtime companion , the barefooted verse master Peter Orlovsky (1933-2010). Downstairs was Max’s Kansas City and Andy Warhol would come there in the evening, as celebrity client, and to the Chemical Corn bank next door, during the day, to deposit money.



Across Union Square also was (and is still) the Farrar, Straus and Giroux publishing office, in a sense the birthplace of the crossword puzzle as we know it. As to the occasional dispute over the relationship of NYTimes puzzle (XWP) department to T&V Country, let me shed some light.

NYT was a late entrant in the popular subjects (no comics ever, into today), with XWPs first printed in 1942 weekends, the daily puzzle only starting in 1950. The puzzle was invented by Arthur Wynne of the NY World in 1913, and spread like wildfire. Margaret Peterbridge, a young grad of Smith, became his assistant in 1919, and over the years developed the format and details that make XWPs our favorites . Simon and Schuster invited her and two others editors to produce a XWP book, and they sold 400K copies. Then, in 1926, Margaret married John Farrar, a young publisher and author. She was hired by NYT, to start the department, and retired in 1969, at 72, to join Farrar, Straus and Giroux of 19 Union Sq (15 St.). As director, she produced 134 XWP books by 1984. At NYT she had two pseudonyms, Anna Gram and Charles Cross, the latter often used for frequent contributors, to create an atmosphere of a less repetitive milieu. Her successor Will Wang (a Wasp, not Oriental, as rumored) was a former NYTimes city editor. Retired at 70 in 1977, he was succeeded by Eugene T. Maleska, a Bronx high school superintendent, a heavy smoker, who died in 1993, a few months after hiring one of his reliable contributors, Melvin Taub, for many years the champion creator of PANs (puns and anagrams), shortly after the latter’s retirement as an underwriting VP at Guardian Life, across Union Square Park from Farrar. Taub, with Maleska and separately had also published XWP books, now offprinted by Print on Demand rip-off artists .After three months of Mel’s emergency rule the NYT chose to permanently replace Maleska with the much younger Will Shortz, already a legend (e.g. he had Brown U make up a curriculum for puzzle management), a former editor of puzzle magazines and since 1987 the NPR Weekend Edition puzzle maker.

More to come, for inquiries address wally@ix.netcom.com. Best New Year’s wishes to our readers from Wally Dobelis and the T&V staff.

Labels: eugene t. maleska, Ike Brussel, Jack Brussel, John Farrar, Margaret Farrar, Melvin Taub, Mickey spillane, Milton Reissman, Paul Cranefield, Peter Orlovsky, Sam Orlinic

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis.



Writing politics is physically wearing, so I intend to return the T&V Country topics, history and culture as much as possible.

Today, when hardcopy books imprint are under a threat from e-books and Google-printed older works, it may be of interest to recall the days, up until the 1980s, when Fourth Avenue below 14th Street, low rent district then , was the Booksellers’ Row of America, with dozens of antiquarian booksellers active. Then the rising rents and new construction forced these low dollar volume cultural oases to dry up, until we only have The Strand left. These stories now updated were covered in my column nearly 20 years ago.



These stories, now somewhat updated, are about life about half a century ago, when I was friendly with a group of book scouts, who met for lunch at the old Luchow’s Restaurant on Saturdays, the traveled up and down the East coast looking for “sleepers,” valuable underpriced books. It was an adventure. Our leaders were Jack Brussel, who published daring material, imported British classics and Japanese Ukiyoe woodcuts and collected Aesop and Napoleon material, Dr. S.R. Shapiro, a bibliographer who dealt in collections for libraries , and Sunny Warshall, who created the Business Americana collection for the Smithsonian (more names to come).



How does a Fourth Avenue book scout like the notorious Bruce (of whom you will read in more stories) acquire his superior knowledge of scarce editions? Is it long exposure to books? If so, then the bookdealers of Fourth Avenue would never throw a rarity, such as H.L.Mencken's "Ventures Into Verse" (Baltimore, 1903), out on their 50c tables, for a scout to snap up. I was actually there when this book was picked up by "sleeper" hunter, on the West side of 4th Ave, outside one of the smaller stores. I tried to offer the finder a premium if he'd let me buy the book. If recollection serves, he simply stuck his tongue out at me, speechless in the face of the enormity of his good luck. (Mencken, incidentally, was so prolific that he wrote under 44 pen names, from George W. Allison in the Baltimore Sunday Herald, 1902, to Robert W. Woodruff, in his Smart Set magazine. One was the exotic Seumas LeChat, not to be confused with the Monsieur LeCoq of George Simenon's - who wrote under 17 pen names.)

The answer is that the scout learns constantly, by reading, talking and lifelong enthusiasm. Book scouts devour antiquarian bookdealer sale lists and auction catalogues, they study author and subject bibliographies and may even visit the Berg Collection of Rare Books in the NYPL. Many antiquarian bookdealers are too busy to do that kind of studying.

I remember having a strange copy of Robert Browning's anonymously published "Pauline, A Fragment and a Confession" (1833), in a beautiful binding, with the Ex-Libris of H. Buxton Forman, a XIX Cent. authority. I bought it at the value of the binding from a New York dealer, who knew books. I knew that it had to be a spurious edition, particularly because Forman had been associated with Thomas Wise, the great bibliographer and forger of Browning and other first editions, and acquired it as a curiosity. There might be a story behind it.

There almost was. I brought the book to the 42nd Street Library, signed it through the guards at the entrance, and took it to Dr John D. Gordan, then librarian of the Berg Collection, where they have two of the real first editions. We agreed that my copy was a forged first, and Dr Gordan very kindly permitted me to take pictures of the title page of the real first edition with my precious Honeywell Pentax single-lens reflex, while he held the book - and then the book got lost! It had been signed out by an attendant, I gave it back to the good doctor - but somehow it disappeared. Dr Gordan became truly excited and called for help. I could not help to overhear that "this man came it, took pictures with his little snap box (what an insult to my best camera), and now the book is gone!" I was politely asked to remain in the reading room, I think they put a guard, discretely, outside the door. In a short while the embarrassed librarian found the book, I was given a perfunctory apology and left Berg Collection feeling that I had exhausted my welcome in these quarters.

I did not return to researching the source of the forgery for a few years, when Marjory Wynne, a rare book expert of the Beinecke Library at Yale offered to help. She asked me for photocopies, and determined, in short order, that my book was a part of a known reprint. The venerable Buxton, or more likely someone else, had taken a Browning Society pamphlet, a near facsimile, reprinting the text of the even then rare book of poems, then stripped off the front matter, and had the poems expensively bound. Who was behind the the charade is moot, but since the pamphlet was printed by Thomas Wise in 1886, ahd he had had passed off other pamphlets printed by him as first editions, it may be that this copy was meant to fool, and the Buxton Forman bookplate helped.

Any time this book surfaces, I look at it with cutriosity and thank the late Marjory Wynne (1917-2009) for identification. Please feel free to comment or question, writing to wally@ix..netcom.com. More to come.

Wally Dobelis and the staff of T&V wish their readers a Merry Cristmas, Happy Channukah and a Joyful Kwanzaa!