A Night Bird
On Columbus Avenue, between Sixty-seventh and Sixty-eighth Streets, near Healey’s Cabaret, a window is lighted no matter at what time in the night you may pass by. If you look into the narrow shop you will see a man sitting in a very small space, surrounded by heaps of books, smoking a long cigar, reading. His store remains closed in the day time and I don’t imagine that the people who spend their nights in Mr. Healey’s Cabaret buy books before they go home, or to some other place, but he doesn’t seem to mind and is perfectly happy with his books, which grow all around him and make the space in which he can move freely smaller from day to day. He sits there all night and reads his books and is delighted to discover some long-forgotten writer, to point out his charms to you, and doesn’t even ask you to buy.
And there is Mr. Lawson, somewhere far west on Forty-second Street, who travels about the country picking up old books in farm houses, and Mr. Schwartz, who used to be a waiter, and who started a book shop near Astor Place. He wanted to cater to the discriminating readers of the spices of life, but Mr. Sumner interfered with his intentions and twice he made the unpleasant acquaintance of the Society for the Suppression of Vice. He had to pay a fine and do something more painful than that, and now if a prospective customer asks for one of the proscribed books, he shudders piously, brings out an old edition of Shakespeare and recommends the English bard as a suitable substitute for some French writer.
Jim Gillin, who had threatened for the past eight years to sell out his book shop on the corner of Twenty-eighth Street and Lexington Avenue, has done it finally, and moved out to his place somewhere in Jersey in order to breed rabbits, the study and the dream of his life. He had delved in books for so many years that nobody would have supposed he would ever change his profession.
Then there is old man Johnson, who prints catalogues every once in a while and sends them out broadcast from his basement store on Twenty-eighth Street near Broadway, and who is constantly and mysteriously busy at his desk, day and night, writing in a big folio. Perhaps he is writing the adventures and tribulations of a New York book dealer.