III.
FORTY-SECOND Street loses its brilliance on Seventh Avenue and shows all the way down to the West Side ferries the sad degeneration of a New York street that was once a fashionable residence section. Glaring electric signs from Fifth to Seventh Avenues. High life after dusk. Eighteen theaters. Cabarets galore. The amusement center of the metropolis around Broadway. The seat of learning in one whole block on Fifth Avenue. The moment you cross Seventh Avenue, cheap rooming houses, tenement dwellings, sweat shops. Wealth and poverty rub elbows. Puritanical decency on the borders of the city’s mire. Lunch rooms, garages, plumber shops, dirty Jewish and Italian groceries, loan brokers’ offices, everywhere signs “Rooms to Let,” gaudily dressed women emerge from dark house entrances on whose stoops laborers read their evening papers. Children everywhere, ragged, uncared for children.
In the midst of this typically American panorama, pinched in between a repair shop and a restaurant, is Mr. Lawson’s book store. He sells books, too, but I would rather call his place of business an “intellectual exchange.”
“How can you sell books in this neighborhood?” I asked of Mr. Lawson on my first visit to his shop. I knew him a dozen of years ago in Chicago. He’s a book man of the old school. He knows books, is well read, well known among the members of his guild. Americana had been his specialty and many a scarce and rare item had he discovered in days gone by.
“What a strange place you have selected here in New York.”
“Stick around for a couple of hours and you will see yourself that book stores of my brand are actually needed in this sort of neighborhood in New York,” was his off-hand answer, while he continued counting green and yellow tickets, assorting them by their colors.
“Coupons,” was the answer. “All these people in my neighborhood insist on getting coupons with all their purchases. So-called profit-sharing coupons. They get them with their cigars, with their soap, with their butter, with most of their victuals. Each of these coupons represents a certain cash value. Here in this catalogue,” and he showed me a voluminous book with many pictures, “you can see what they can exchange for their coupons if they choose to save enough of them. Here lies the point. They never save enough of these coupons. Most of my customers live from hand to mouth, often they are in actual need of ten or fifteen cents. I buy their coupons. At other times, again they come down here to buy coupons in order to complete the needed number of the slips and to exchange them for some household article, but mostly for ‘gifts.’ You would be surprised how they like cheap bric-a-brac, phony jewelry and most of all, cut-glass—imitation cut-glass, of course. Most of my business is done after 6 o’clock in the evening.
“See the music rolls over there? A player-piano concern established some time ago a branch in this section and got rid of hundreds of instruments. And whenever the people need money they bring me their music rolls. I pay a few cents for them. But that’s just what they need. They sell them on Thursday and Friday. On Saturday, after they receive their pay checks, they buy new ones. It is a part of their life’s routine.”
An old woman came in with a bunch of magazines, Mr. Lawson bought them for a few cents.