Midnight is when I first came upon it, a step below street level and open for business. Never mind the lateness of the hour, the sheer existence of a secondhand bookshop was a miracle.
Almost all of Manhattan’s bookstores have been driven to extinction by high rents, although a few guerrilla booksellers persist out on the sidewalks. Near Tompkins Square Park one recent afternoon, I happened on a table whose proprietor could not be past her 30s but who had exquisite taste in the old literary counterculture. She wrapped her wares in clear plastic: immaculate editions of Richard Brautigan’s poetry, Abbie Hoffman’s ravings, Kafka’s stories, and Siddhartha. It’s as if she selected her stock to keep the East Village ’60s spirit alive against the depredations of the junior-finance types filling wine bars all the way over to Avenue C.
When I first lived in Alphabet City in the 1980s, the neighborhood was edgy, dangerous with crack and crime, dotted with punk music and rebel art. A few dive bars live on, but the ascendance of Wall Street and New York University has wiped out most of the old world.
Gentrification has its benefits. Rue-B, a live jazz bar with no cover charge, is everything New York was meant to be: sax, scotch, sophistication.
In general, however, the march has been a relentless one toward what back in the day we would have called yuppiedom. So when I bought a pristine edition of the Marquis de Sade off that bookseller’s table, along with a vintage copy of Kierkegaard with cover lettering by Edward Gorey, price was beside the point. Could I have found them online, perhaps cheaper? Sure, but I liked helping to support a rare bookseller-connoisseur keeping alive the old bohemian impulse of cultural opposition to commercial society.
The paradox of being in New York City on a fellowship for a book project is that the metropolis is still the center of American publishing but books no longer visibly dot its landscape. That’s why it was so pleasant to stumble upon the basement bookstore at midnight and discover it full of serious intellectual offerings: philosophy, art, erotica, literature, scholarship.
What immediately attracted my attention, given my own predilections, was a full bookshelf devoted to radical politics. There lay volumes that I, in a lifetime of collecting, had never seen: unusual editions of the anarchist Peter Kropotkin, tomes on Soviet five-year plans with constructivist cover art, hundred-year-old works on the International Ladies Garment Workers Union — the kind of thing that Lower East Side immigrant organizers once scoured for meaning.
The rare became the astonishing as I somewhat aimlessly opened a book by Georgi Dimitrov, a Bulgarian Communist whom the Nazis made a fall guy for the Reichstag fire in a key moment during Hitler’s consolidation of power. Inside I found the signatures of William Z. Foster and Earl Browder, the two heads of the Communist Party of the United States of America in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as James Ford, another Communist and the first African-American to run for vice president of the United States. All three had personally inscribed the book to a rank-and-file member who had assisted with the 1936 Communist Party presidential campaign and who would later serve in Spain fighting against fascism with the Abraham Lincoln Brigades. The price, unbelievably, was $18.
“How do you happen to have all of these left-wing books?” I asked the cashier. The source, he said, was the Communist Party’s abandoned old library, which one party member had absorbed into his Upper West Side apartment.
I revisited the bookstore one evening several weeks later with a friend who is a graduate student in history at Harvard. We had started the night at an old-school Jewish restaurant counter, eating borscht and matzo-ball noodle soup. I told him about the bookshop, and soon we were there, both of us standing in front of the left-wing shelf.
Knowing that he studies the history of capitalism, I handed him an old edition of Louis Boudin’s The Theoretical System of Karl Marx issued by the socialist publisher Charles Kerr. I already owned the book, so I didn’t think twice about passing it his way, but my heart sank as he opened it to the signature of the author, the patriarch of a family that would produce lawyer Leonard Boudin and Weatherwoman Kathy Boudin. My friend looked at me deferentially, willing to cede it to me. Somehow I summoned, “Hey, you saw it first.”
A few minutes later, I pulled down Austin Lewis’s The Militant Proletariat, another ancient Kerr imprint. I already owned a copy, so again I was going to pass it to my friend, but this time I checked the flyleaf first. There, to my amazement, was an ownership signature of Max Shachtman, whose book Race and Revolution I edited for Verso. Shachtman, who passed through the Communist, Trotskyist, social-democratic, and neoconservative movements, had dated his ownership as 1920, when he was 16 or 17.
“It’s karma,” my friend said: Because I had let him keep Boudin, the bookstore had yielded up Shachtman. Hardly a proper materialist analysis, but who could prove it wasn’t magic?
One week later I went back, this time by myself.
Neither I nor my friend had spent much time examining the many volumes of Georg Lukács, the Hungarian philosopher, since they were mostly modern editions. Simply out of curiosity I plucked from the shelf a garish, purple-covered edition of his 1923 classic History and Class Consciousness, put out by Merlin in the United Kingdom in 1971. In the last year of his life, Lukács had signed his name on the title page in a cramped hand. A penciled notation stated that the book had come from the estate of the New School professor Zoltan Tarr, a Hungarian-American expert on Lukács.
Writing a book is a test of hope, one that in the age of cellphone preoccupation yields meditation on what seems a very precarious culture of the book. Does anyone read now? Who will buy this book? For whom do I write? Myself? The profession? The ages?
That is what made the magic bookshop so striking: its reminder of the power of the physical book, the scrawls inside attesting to the historical presence of prior owners or authors who once held the very volume in their hand, and for whom it had great meaning too.
For me this circle was brought to completion when I met Martin Duberman, the distinguished historian whose exceptional generosity has made possible the grant enabling the book I am writing about sex and the left before Stonewall. At our lunch we were too busy comparing notes about history, politics, and life for me to find time to tell him about the magic bookshop, but he had brought along a gift: his biography of the historian Howard Zinn.
When I got home, I noticed with delight that it was signed. And I read it.
Christopher Phelps is the Martin Duberman Fellow at the New York Public Library, associate professor of American studies at the University of Nottingham, and co-author, with Howard Brick, of Radicals in America: The U.S. Left Since the Second World War (Cambridge University Press, 2015).
