mutterings and ravings no. 9
Date: Fri, 29 Jan 1999 16:46:24 -0800
Reply-To: Harry Nudel <nudel-soho@MINDSPRING.COM>
Sender: Bibliofind News and Views <NEWS@BIBLIO.BIBLIOFIND.COM>
From: Harry Nudel <nudel-soho@MINDSPRING.COM>
Subject: mutterings & ravings on the upper west side
been doing so much M&R in daily life..hard to sit down to a
concentrated dose of it..last week the guy at the Fleemarket...nice 'nough
junk guy..broad irish brogue..cleans out houses.. .tells me he has some
illustrated books..with visions of signed limited Rackhams dancing in my
head...I say I'll shuffle up to the upper west side..
i know this is wild goose chase #1,00l but nothin' much better to
do..the books turn out to be two boxes of the worst ????? i've ever see..i
paste a nice smile and say they're very nice but 'no for me'..and step out
into the Upper West Side Nite..the last place where the Berlin Wall
exists..Where Lionel Trilling can be seen a a cultural figure not a party
hack..and Phillip Roth (the Barbara Cortlandt of the demi intelligentsia)
can be seen as a novelist..and where every art movement from pop to
performance to conceptional to minimialism..which are all now passe...their
influence in Tokyo, Seoul, Buenos Aires being spent..is a whisper to large
rent cotrolled apartments and rising real estate values..nothing passes
this Wall from downtown..
So...go 'em bookstore..a rather new one down a few steps..two
dealers and me meeting in the gloam..talk of the internet..i keep my mouth
shut..nice 'nough stock..foreign books etc..nice condition..picky picky..no
junk here..nor a really interesting book is site...i can see the three
owners..sitting around all day bemoaning their fate..their mouths open
catching flies..never put books on net where they'll sell..better sit
around vacant bookstore daze catching intellectual flies..
One of the dealers..invites me to his new place...down some steps
next to the forturne teller..(the other guy in nice 'nough..but i haven't
seen his calendar where he models dresses)..go....chat for a while in more
basement gloam about net..the topic of the decade..this Dealer sez. no put
'em book 'em on net for fear every one will KNOW his prices..he deals in
natural history...mention Arader is at ABE..and he sells books for 3 mill.
and doesn't seem much worried..got em computer...i'll help..NO...sure to
get onea the day Saul Bellow learns to write an American sentence..
All this muttering in the gloam..reminds me of one of my pet
obsessions...the venerable older, bigger store on U.W.S..that i hate with a
vengeance...these, for all i know, very nice guys....ran for Years Ab ad
wanting books....ad was subsidized by the two dollars they'd charge their
search customers...then they'd have these wants of books they had no
intention of ever paying...fishing without a pole hoping the great white
whale would beach up on their shores..people who complain about b&n 50 0r
100 per cent mark up shoud 'member these guys would buy a book if they
could mark it up a billion per cent only..they wasted enough poor sucker
book quoters labor to tear down the Berlin Wall..
In twenty years..tbis store in the midst of Jewish Diaspora
unparralled and troves up books in Yiddish, Czech, German,...went on
blithely selling Patrick Dennis..and Phillip Roth...and was good at books
for the average reader..'bout 2 miles from the Apollo Theatre...they would
never deign to buy at auction..or wait on line for a book sale..better to
sucker some schnook from Topeka..stolen labor to me..& a cultural
crime...if I were Stalin's Cultural Czar..i'd RICo these to the deep white
permafrost....
Whenever I hear that they like to sell books to people who read...get
out that gun..shoot 'em up...by and may your wild goose chases end up in a
pot..not a stew...Dr n.
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