NP but related - Gotham Book Mart News

[Burns, Erik]

from today's NYT ... didn't TRP pass through there, famously? etb
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July 24, 2001

Famed Bookstore Looks for New Home
By MEL GUSSOW

Joyce Dopkeen/The New York Times
The Gotham Book Mart has been at 41 West 47th Street in Manhattan since
1946, but its owner, Andreas Brown, is now in search of a less quirky
building for the store.

Nancy Siesel/The New York Times
For customers, browsing at the Gotham Book Mart can be an ordeal.

Gotham Book Mart and Gallery
A 1948 party for Osbert and Edith Sitwell (seated, center) drew a roomful of
bright lights to the Gotham Book Mart: clockwise from W. H. Auden, on the
ladder, are Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, Delmore Schwartz, Randall
Jarrell, Charles Henri Ford, William Rose Benét, Stephen Spender, Marya
Zaturenska, Horace Gregory, Tennessee Williams, Richard Eberhart, Gore Vidal
and José Garcia Villa.


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The Gotham Book Mart is putting its cluttered West 47th Street townhouse up
for sale and plans to move to a new modern home, replacing the cozy jumble
that has attracted bibliophiles and browsers for more than 50 years.

The Gotham, the most tradition-bound of all New York bookstores, is asking
$7.9 million for the five-story building. Over the years, the store has
drawn such literary figures as J. D. Salinger, Saul Bellow and Edward Gorey
to its anomalous location, an outpost in the heart of the thriving diamond
district. Considering the rising value of property on West 47th Street,
Andreas Brown, the owner of the Gotham — who resides on the building's fifth
floor — indicated that he has every expectation of selling it for that
amount, or more.

After the sale, the store will probably be relocated to a more commercial
space in the same area, with ample shelves and storage room, an elevator and
other conveniences that, Mr. Brown said, have been lacking. In addition to
finding a new building for the bookstore, Mr. Brown will have to move to a
new apartment, less of a concern to him than relocating his business.

"The customers love the nostalgia; they don't want it to change," he said.
"But if you're trying to run the store, the nostalgia wears thin very
quickly. Before I came here and owned it, I was an organized person. I
believe in having things filed away and in retrievable order."

Founded in 1920 by Frances Steloff, the Gotham is the classic little
bookshop around the corner. It was first on West 45th Street near the
theater district, then moved to 51 West 47th Street. Since 1946, it has been
at 41 West 47th Street, a building that Miss Steloff bought from Columbia
University for $65,000. The new owner marked the move with a poem: "The old
must go—/ Make room for the new/ Like everyone else/ So, Gotham, too."

place to find new, old and out-of-print books, especially fiction and poetry
by contemporary writers. Miss Steloff was celebrated as a courageous
bookseller, repeatedly challenging censors by ordering copies of "Lady
Chatterley's Lover" and "Tropic of Cancer" directly from the authors when
the books were banned from sale in the 1920's and 1930's.

Over the years, the Gotham has had a fervent following especially among
writers and people in the performing arts. Charles Chaplin, George and Ira
Gershwin and Martha Graham were frequent customers. Many authors come in to
buy books (and also to see if their own books are on the shelves), turning
the shop into an informal literary clubhouse. Miss Steloff was a founder of
the James Joyce Society, which still meets in the second floor gallery at
the Gotham. She lived in an apartment on the third floor with French doors
leading to a balcony facing 47th Street.

She continued to live there after Mr. Brown bought the store in 1967. Her
apartment is now the rare book room. She often hired writers as clerks,
including Allen Ginsberg and Amiri Baraka. "Tennessee Williams lasted less
than a day," she once said. "He couldn't get here on time in the morning
and, also, he wasn't very good at wrapping packages."

With Mr. Brown's encouragement, the Gotham was a home for Gorey, who, after
his death, remains a spectral presence, many of his books for sale in signed
editions and regular exhibitions of his work in the gallery. Woody Allen,
who periodically browses through the film books, once called the Gotham
"everyone's fantasy of what the ideal bookshop is."

John Updike, a Gotham regular since he arrived in New York in the
mid-1950's, said: "West 47th Street won't be the same without the Gotham.
Pure diamonds from now on." He added, "It was a diamond of a bookstore. It
had a tremendous inventory. I go there to inhale the aura of books and
literature. I'll miss it on 47th Street, but I'm sure I'll drop in to the
new location."

Whenever Edward Albee is "within two blocks," he visits the Gotham, he said.
He added that he would "miss the old place," but he is sanguine about the
move: "As long as it's not going out of business — there are very very few
real bookstores left in New York."

John Guare expressed his regret at the loss of the building. "There is
something about that place, those ghosts," he said. "The patina of time that
belongs to that bookstore can't be replicated."

Twenty years after Mr. Brown purchased the Gotham from Miss Steloff, he
bought the building itself for $1 million. After she died in 1989 at 101,
Mr. Brown recalled that when he bought the shop, she told him, "You are not
the owner. You're the caretaker, the custodian."

In a recent interview he said that the increase in offers from prospective
buyers made it difficult to think of renovating the building and remaining
in place. His plans to sell were first reported this month in The New York
Post.

Because Mr. Brown, now 68, continues to buy entire libraries (including
those of E. E. Cummings and Truman Capote), only a fraction of the Gotham's
stock is accessible to the public, and a great deal of it is stored off
premises.

The main floor is double-shelved, books behind books. On other floors there
are boxes upon boxes. The books are in alphabetical order, but they are a
long way from being cataloged in a fully computerized system.

"We're just bursting at the seams," he said. "My lawyer likes to tell me
that the Gotham is probably the best example in Manhattan of the poor use of
commercial real estate. The property is much more valuable to the diamond
merchants." If the property were on a nearby street, it would be worth only
half as much, Mr. Brown said.

By demolishing the building, with its 9,000 square feet, a buyer could more
than triple the space under zoning laws by erecting a high-rise of 12 to 14
floors.

When Mr. Brown moves, presumably by the end of the year, along with the
books he will take the Gotham's familiar sign, "Wise Men Fish Here." Miss
Steloff's husband, David Moss, suggested both the name of the store and the
motto (from Washington Irving). In its place a merchant might erect a sign
reading, "Wise Diamond Buyers Fish Here."

Trying to define the nature of his business, Mr. Brown said, "Most people go
to a bookstore because they're looking for a specific book. Many of our
customers come in with no particular one in mind. They want to look around
and end up buying eight or nine books. It's serendipity.

"I like to have a store where we cater to the browser," he said, "And we
don't do that right now. We have to move four boxes for someone to get to a
shelf."

After he bought the store, he said, he looked behind boxes and found sealed
cases of books from Random House: "We opened a box and there were pristine
copies of a William Faulkner novel from the late 1930's. Frances didn't
believe in returning good books to the publisher. It was like opening King
Tut's tomb. But that's no way to run a bookstore."

On a recent sleepy Saturday, he was alone in the store when a California
book buyer entered. A collector of work by artists in The New Yorker, he
inquired about sketches that William Steig did for an unpublished book. "I
had exactly what he wanted," Mr. Brown said. "I'm sure he would have bought
them on the spot, but I couldn't find them." It turned out that a staff
member had filed the sketches for safekeeping.

Mr. Brown's own fond memories extend back to the days of Miss Steloff: "I've
had a great tug on my conscience about selling the building, because it was
Frances's home. I'm only selling it now because I think under the
circumstances Frances would say it was the right thing to do, that it would
be good for the store."

Recently Mr. Brown guided a visitor up and down the creaky stairs and
through the narrow crannies of the building. In the basement, a book-lined
catacomb, he suddenly had a vision of a new Gotham.

"If someone would sell me half a floor in a commercial building near here in
the 40's, I'd be happy," he said. "If you got off the elevator, you would
step into this huge space with everything in systematic order,
air-conditioned, well lighted, well labeled. You could find things. I dream
of having a space so big that it would take me five years to fill it up. It
would be a Gotham Book Mart with 150,000 books on display rather than this
tiny, crowded Charles Dickens building we have now."