The Madison Book Store
The only uptown book shop that keeps open in the evening. The visitors here are quite different from those on 42d street. But I guess they are as lonesome and often as helpless as the people who come to Mr. Lawson’s shop. There are the strangers from the big hostelries on Fifth avenue, the girls from the Studio Club, and a good many physicians from the nearby clinical buildings. Mr. Alexander A. Salop is the master of the mansion. A young man, studious looking, perhaps because he wears eye glasses. A shrewd business man but books are not only merchandise to him. He reads much in several languages, has his likes and dislikes in literature and keeps always a great variety of modern German and French books. A little room in the back of his shop is consecrated to the bookworms. A few comfortable chairs, reading lamps, library tables, it looks very homey and too inviting to simply buy and go. Peter Stammer, who calls himself “The Original New York Book Hunter” and who knows the book if it was ever printed anywhere and at any time in this world, comes here often in the evening to pick up books, but mostly to chat, to “swap” experiences.
Mr. Stammer ought to write his memoirs for the benefit of contemporary literature. Here are a few interesting bits gleaned from him several days ago:
“Did you ever know,” he asked, “that Henry James had a sister? She must have been a literary woman of great ability. About 40 years ago I was a typesetter in an English town. I remember the most curious job I ever had to do was a book by Miss James. It was a sort of autobiography most extraordinary. A big book of several hundred pages, very intimate and outspoken. Only three copies were to be printed. The type was destroyed and even the proof pages had to be returned. I wonder what ever happened to that book. I wish I could have made a copy of its contents. I set up the first edition of Oscar Wilde’s ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol.’ That was in Boston while I worked for Benjamin Tucker.
“You would naturally think that a book printed in many millions of copies could never become scarce. I thought so, too, until I ran across a poem by Bret Harte, his Excelsior. I didn’t find the poem among his collected works. Bret Harte collectors didn’t seem to know of its existence. I started inquiries to investigate and I found that this poem had been written as an advertisement for a well known soap, had been printed in millions of copies, distributed free of charge all over America. Curious enough, my copy was the only existing one outside one in the files of the soap concern.”
Mr. Stammer knows books and people so well, has met so many writers, he really ought to retire from business for a year and write his reminiscences.
IV.
BOOK dealers and dressmakers are very much alike. Both supply us with things most necessary in daily life, and with its useless luxuries. If you are rich you walk into an exclusive dressmaking establishment on Fifth Avenue. You tell the dressmaker: “I want to look slender, I like such and such a color, I want long skirts or short skirts.” You ask for an evening gown or for a street dress or for an afternoon gown. And if you are rich and wish to buy books you’ll go next door to the exclusive book shop, you will tell the salesman: “I want a novel or a biography, something serious or something humorous; I don’t want it too free.” The salesman will size you up and will bring forth the books which you will wish to take with you. At your next visit, dressmaker as well as bookdealer will have your “size” and your “number” and you will not have to repeat your special desires.
If you are only a well-to-do man or woman with a regular salary or income, you have your charge accounts in department stores and medium class shops, in book stores on Booksellers’ Row, as Fourth Avenue between Eleventh and Fourteenth Street was so justly christened, or perhaps in one of the many book shops on Fifty-ninth Street. The merchants here will not pay so very much attention to your wishes and to your tastes, but try to impress you with the sanctity of the merciless goddess “Vogue.” The salesman doesn’t care that you detest ruffles and fringes. They are in season and therefore you ought to wear them or you are a back number and he treats you with contempt. The department store book salesman will tell you that Robert Chambers’ last novel is “The Best Seller” and if you tell him that Chambers doesn’t write to your taste, he will simply pity you, and tell you that “Everybody” is reading it, and that is final.
But if you are poor or your circumstances permit you to expend only a certain amount of money for your clothes and for your books and you despise the department store atmosphere with its alluring bargains that persecute you ever after you were weak enough to buy them, like spooks of murdered souls, then adventures galore are in store for you, especially if you live in New York. Because one day surely you will run across “that marvelous dressmaker” who charges only a couple of dollars a day, follows your ideas, creates dreams of garments, and makes dressing a pleasure for you.
And in the strangest parts of the city, like a geranium pot on the sill of a tenement house, you encounter once in a while a real book store in New York. Is not the discovery an event in our unromantic lives? Looking over the dust-covered treasures is an exploration into strange lands, and usually a talk with the proprietor himself charms us like the fairy tale of long forgotten childhood.
Second Avenue, around First Street, is the promenade of that part of the Bowery which has not yet been turned into factories and sweat shops. Here are delicatessen stores, second-hand furniture dealers, grocery shops, ice cream parlors, drug stores, moving picture theatres, with crudely painted advertising boards depicting scenes from blood-and-thunder dramas. Then there is Kettel’s Theatre, where they play Shakespeare in Yiddish. Thousands of men and women people the sidewalks and street. Roumanian, Hungarian, German and Polish with a Jewish accent are spoken here, and Yiddish, of course, the guttural sounds of which give the ear the same sensation as the eye receives from the window display of the foreign looking pickles, fancily prepared onions, and enormous strangely-shaped sausages of the stores. The women are without headgear, in underskirts, with blankets or shawls around their shoulders, their shoes unbuttoned; they have run out to buy something. Everybody on this street seems to buy or sell, talking loudly, bargaining with a passion inherited through generations. On the corner of Second Avenue and First Street is the Municipal Court, with its crowds of lawyers, of fighting, screaming and excited men and women on the doorsteps.