Nobody's Looking at You

by Janet Malcolm

  One day, Judith showed me an email from a girl in China—“a simple Chinese girl in her final year of senior high,” as she called herself—who “started to have a dream of working in a bookstore” when she was very young. “Books make me feel safe,” she wrote. “Staying in somewhere with books” was what she wanted to do. But it isn’t only simple Chinese girls who want to stay in somewhere with books. Bookshops have an almost universal appeal. What constitutes this appeal is hard to pin down. When you enter an art gallery or an antique shop, you see what you hope will surprise and delight you, but a bookstore does not show what it is selling. The books are like closed clamshells. It is from the collective impression, from the sight of many books wedged together on many shelves, that the mysterious good feeling comes. Is there something that leaks out of the closed books, some subliminal message about culture and aspiration? The association of books with humanistic ideals is deeply entrenched in the public imagination, and finds its way into the rueful articles that regularly appear about the closing of bookshops in cities throughout the world, whose own subliminal message is that books are a kind of last bastion against barbarity.

  This association is taken to the height of absurdity when decorators come into bookshops and buy books by the yard for the apartments of their barbaric clients. The three sisters are properly contemptuous of but grateful for this trade. There is a back room at the Argosy where books for decorators are kept, some arranged by color. All-white libraries are apparently in vogue today among decorators of advanced taste. When Naomi was going through the books on the ledge, she pounced on a book by Milan Kundera whose white cover made it a candidate for the all-white shelf. Sets of no great value but bound in impressive-looking leather and gilt are earmarked for the less advanced decorators. However, as Naomi wryly reported, when Ralph Lauren’s subalterns come to the Argosy to buy old leather-bound books for his fantasy aristocratic interiors, they avoid the sets of classic authors in mint condition that a parvenu would choose. For his imaginary old-shoe libraries, Lauren seeks tattered, scuffed, broken-spined copies of books by obscure writers, and finds them in the Argosy’s basement in a section titled “Old Bindings, $10.” I stopped in at the Ralph Lauren store at Seventy-Second Street and Madison Avenue to see how his shabby-chic library looked in situ, but a new fantasy—something sleek and metallic—had evidently taken hold of Lauren’s imagination, and there wasn’t a book to be seen in the entire store.

  * * *

  In a conversation at the 2010 PEN World Voices Festival, Patti Smith told the novelist Jonathan Lethem about her lifelong love of old books. “Even as a child I would go to rummage sales or church bazaars and pick out books for pennies, for a quarter. I got a first-edition Dickens with a green velvet cover, with a tissue guard, with a gravure of Dickens. You could get things like that. It has never gone away, my love of the book. The paper, the font, the cloth covers.” Lethem then asked Smith, “And did you work at rare bookshops at one point?” She replied:

  I only worked at one: Argosy Book Store, in 1967. Though I falsified my credentials as a book restorer. The old fellow who ran Argosy was very touched by me and he tried to train me, but I spilled rabbit glue all over a nineteenth-century Bible. He said it was not really rare, though; it was just a trainer Bible. Still, he had to let me go.

  Richard Rosenblatt, who is the Argosy’s current restorer, was trained by a successor of Patti Smith’s named Grace Owen and by “the old fellow” himself, twenty-eight years ago, when he was thirty-five. Restoring is Rosenblatt’s secondary profession. His first calling is art: he is a realist painter, primarily of landscapes, whose work sells—steadily—through galleries on Cape Cod and in Garrison, New York. He works four days a week at the Argosy, in an anteroom of the print gallery, seated at a long table, and wearing a spectacularly dirty apron but giving the impression of a neat, well-put-together person. Behind him are shelves of books with broken spines and loose pages and torn covers. His tools are bookbinder’s glue, a metal instrument called a micro-spatula, a tongue-depressor-like implement called a bone folder, an X-Acto knife, rice paper, book cloth, acid-free tissue, and quantities of rubber bands, which he says are key to the operation. The sisters and Ben bring him damaged books that they consider valuable, and he repairs them—“mending gently,” as he calls it, with a minimum of intrusion and the easy decisiveness of the achieved craftsman.

  * * *

  Perhaps the biggest disappointment of the holiday season, the most anxiously awaited guest who did not show up, was Bill Clinton, who frequently came to the Argosy during the weeks before Christmas to buy expensive gifts for friends. But this year he had been called away to the funeral of Nelson Mandela at the time of his expected visit, and now, after a false report that put everyone at the shop into a state of heightened adolescent excitement, it became clear that he would not appear. Many years ago, Adina, at a birthday dinner for Averell Harriman—to which she had been brought by a Washington lawyer she was going out with—had been seated next to Clinton, whom she had never heard of, since he was then only an Arkansas politician though already the world’s most indecently charming man. The next day, Adina and Clinton met again, at another function, and—as she wonderingly reported—he remembered every word she had said at dinner. When Clinton became president, Adina sent him a historical document she thought he might like. He began coming to the bookstore after the end of his presidency. When he and Hillary moved to Chappaqua, he applied to the sisters for help after a flood in the basement ruined most of the books they had temporarily stored there. The Argosy succeeded in restoring or replacing all but a few.

  On New Year’s Eve day, a young man came into the Argosy with four boxes of books that the sisters immediately bought from him. The books all bore the bookplate of the lawyer-novelist Louis Auchincloss, who died in 2010, and whose library was known to have been sold. The young man had a strange story about a room with a sliding door that had been overlooked at the time of the sale, from which the books came. The sisters didn’t examine the story too closely. A quick glance had told them that these were books they wanted, and they offered a price. He accepted, and Judith wrote him a check. A sense of Lou Cohen hovered in the air. “To prepare my daughters for a bookselling career, I conducted classes in the bookstore by going over new acquisitions with them,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I would take center position and comment on each book as I handled it. Later each of the girls took turns pricing the books, with me on the sidelines watching and only occasionally correcting. They have often corrected me, and justifiably.”

  A great many of the books in the four boxes were by Henry James and Edith Wharton, in old though not rare nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century editions. Many had penciled writings on the flyleaves and blank back pages. In his copy of The Wings of the Dove, Auchincloss left a record of his novelist’s aliveness to the lesson of the master:

  Points of View Book 1 Kate

  Book 2 Densher

  3 susie’s

  5 Millies

  But see p. 194, for a shift back to Kate’s

  Another annotated volume was an 1882 edition of Henry Adams’s novel Democracy, which had been published anonymously and had given rise to a great deal of speculation about its authorship. Henry James had evidently been one of the speculators. Auchincloss noted on the flyleaf:

  P 209 H James spotted the term “mock lace” and said only an Englishman would have used it. An American would have said “imitation lace.” But, of course, Adams had lived for years in England.

  On a back page of Wharton’s The Custom of the Country, Auchincloss wrote, “P. 37 ‘When the kissing had to stop’ is actually a line from Browning’s ‘A Toccata of Galuppi’s.’” In Madame de Treymes, he noted that “Fanny has been ‘improved’ like Chad Newsome,” and “the Boykinses seem to stem from the Tristrams in HJ’s The American.”

  The sisters evaluated the Auchincloss books and dispatched them to various destinations in the bookshop. Judith took a poetry collec
tion called A Masque of Poets, which included one of the few poems that Emily Dickinson published in her lifetime, the well-known “Success,” to the first-editions room. A number of the James and Wharton novels went to “Select Reading,” among them a specially attractive two-volume edition of The Golden Bowl, published in 1927. I considered buying the set (for sixty dollars) but hesitated too long. The book was gone when I went to look at it again. Among the books in the four boxes that were not written by James or Wharton was a little book, from 1884, called Bibliothèque de la reine Marie-Antoinette, whose flyleaf thrillingly bore the faded signature of Edmond de Goncourt. But the book wasn’t worth much, Naomi told me: “He isn’t asked for.”

  Auchincloss was a longtime customer of the bookstore, and, Naomi fondly recalled, he would always check “Selected Reading” to see if one of his novels had been admitted into its elite ranks. He was very happy, she said, when this finally happened. He continues to be represented in “Select Reading” by one of his novels—and in the basement’s fiction section by eighteen of them.

  * * *

  Naomi’s son Zack is the only child of her marriage to the late Stuart E. Hample, who made a career of being funny in many genres: children’s books, plays, cartoons, comic strips, and performances. He died in 2009, at the age of eighty-four. Zack, a friendly and cheerful man of thirty-six, has been working in his mother’s top-floor aerie for the past two years, cataloguing her collection of autographs, documents, and letters for the Argosy website. But he is at his post full-time only during the months of the year when baseball isn’t being played. During the baseball season, he is a ball hawk. A ball hawk, as defined by Paul Dickson’s baseball dictionary, is (1) “an especially fast and adept outfielder; one who covers a lot of ground,” and (2) “a person who collects as souvenirs balls that are hit outside a ballpark.” Zack is not a ballplayer; it is the second definition that applies to him, though it doesn’t begin to express the magnitude of his collection, or the excess of his zeal. In twenty-five years, he has caught more than seven thousand baseballs hit or thrown into the stands at major-league ball games, the majority during batting practice, but many during the game proper. He is by far the world’s leading ball hawk of the second kind. He traces his obsession to early childhood, when he watched baseball on television and saw the fans who caught foul balls or home runs “celebrating as if this was the best thing that ever happened to them.” He went on, “Little kids are impressionable, and that stuck in my mind, though I know that a lot of little kids see fans catching balls on TV and they don’t go on to become insane about it.”

  Zack brings to cataloguing the same qualities that he brings to ball hawking. He is currently obsessed with eliminating every one of what he calls “the ugly abbreviations” that were standard in the days of laconic printed catalogues but are not needed on the wordy Internet. Thus, for example, “TEG” becomes “top edge gilt” in Zack’s relentless restorations of full words to the online listings. He is also revising descriptions of the items that were affected by Hurricane Sandy. Hurricane Sandy? At Fifty-Ninth Street and Lexington Avenue? When Naomi said “We are safe here,” she was not factoring in the role that the freakishly accidental plays in almost every life. During the hurricane, a long row of bricks at the level of the thirty-second floor came loose from the skyscraper next door—the one that replaced the brownstones—and came crashing down, some into the street, and others onto the Argosy’s roof, where they made a hole, so that water gushed into the sixth-floor autograph room and then seeped down into the fifth-floor first-editions room, and even reached the fourth-floor shipping department. A great many of Naomi’s valuable documents and autographs were either damaged or completely ruined, and many of Judith’s first editions were lost beyond repair. “Insurance paid for that,” Zack said. “But it’s weird. We all feel like, yeah, we’re getting the money for a book it might have taken ten years to sell and so in a way we got the money quicker—and yet it was so unsatisfying and depressing.” By the time of my visits to the Argosy, the yearlong work of restoration of the fourth, fifth, and sixth floors was completed, and no trace of the damage remained. In fact, in some respects, the rooms had profited from the disaster; when their moldering and curling linoleums were removed, for example, beautiful wood floors came into view that nobody suspected were there.

  Early in our talk, a messenger had come in and handed Zack a letter, which he glanced at and put aside. Now he picked it up and said, “I think this is a piece of hate mail. I recognize the handwriting. In 2009, I had an unfortunate experience with a fan at Yankee Stadium. I caught a lot of balls during batting practice, and some guy in the stands took exception. He said something rude, and what I should have done was just walk away. But for some reason I chose to engage, and it just escalated and got ugly. Now this guy sends me hate mail. Of all the things in the world that are horrible and cause suffering to other people, you wouldn’t think that catching baseballs was one of them.”

  * * *

  In the middle of January, the three sisters and I had another conversation around the table in the first-editions room. Naomi recalled that her father always had his nose in a book dealer’s catalogue, studying the “points” by which rare editions could be recognized and distinguished from editions of lesser value. Judith cited a classic “point.” On page 205 of a true first edition of The Great Gatsby, a typesetter’s error turns Fitzgerald’s “sickantired” into “sick in tired.” “If someone comes in and says he has a first edition of The Great Gatsby, you turn to page 205 and if it says ‘sickantired’ you say, ‘Well, yes, it’s the first edition, but the second issue, and therefore isn’t worth as much,’” Judith said. Then, once again, as if some higher force compelled them to do so, Judith and Naomi fell into squabbling about the past. I had remarked on the way Lou seemed to do everything right. “Or were there some mistakes?”

  “If there were mistakes,” Judith said, “they were not big ones.”

  “Well,” Adina said, “when he bought the building next to him, he could have bought the whole block for those prices.”

  “He bought what he needed,” Judith said.

  “He was paying the mortgage for decades,” Naomi said.

  “He never had a mortgage,” Judith said.

  “What?” Naomi said. “I remember the day he paid it off.”

  “He never had a mortgage.”

  “He didn’t have the money to buy a building.”

  “It was cheap. This building cost a hundred thousand dollars.”

  “I don’t know where you got that number from. It was a hundred and fifty-three thousand.”

  “I was going to say a hundred and fifty-five thousand.”

  “There’s no way he could have paid that kind of money. He had a very small operation. He didn’t have a hundred and fifty-three thousand dollars.”

  “I happen to know there was no mortgage.”

  “I happen to know there was.”

  The fight went on—and then, as before, abruptly ended, without resolution and with no blood drawn.

  Adina brought up, not for the first time, a gesture made by her older sisters that felt like a caress. “After I was here maybe a year, my sisters spoke with my father and said, ‘We think that Adina should be earning the same salary we are.’ Because I’d never catch up otherwise. I’d be a hundred and they’d be a hundred and two. It made us very friendly and very warm.”

  “We really get along,” Naomi said. “But more since our father died. When he was alive, we were always vying for his attention and compliments, and there wasn’t enough of either to go around. He was very chintzy with his compliments. It was embarrassing for him to say a nice word. It would be emoting to say, ‘You did a good job.’ So we were always trying to pry a compliment out of him. But after he died we really stuck together. We have always been equals here. There is no struggle for power—because there is no power to have.”

  “We are foremost interested in the welfare of the Argosy,” Judith said
. “We have that as a goal, so we usually agree.”

  “It’s not hard,” Adina said.

  I asked them to describe themselves.

  “We have different personalities and we have a lot of different outside interests,” Judith said. “We don’t see a lot of each other after work. We have different friends and we do different things.”

  “We have different strengths,” Naomi said. “Judy is a fantastic letter writer. Adina is fantastic with customers. She has patience. She is good at finding gifts for people. She is very neat. I am a slob. But we’re kind of interchangeable in the jobs of the bookshop. We all love to be at the front desk.”

  “What were you like as kids?”

  “I was quiet,” Judith said. “Naomi was very active. My mother described how we started to walk. I almost never fell down because I would figure out how far it is from here to there. Naomi never walked. She started running before she could walk and she fell down all the time, but she picked herself up. I was careful and quiet.”

  “I was the baby,” Adina said.

  The talk turned to the curriculum of the New York public schools the sisters (and I) had attended in the 1940s. Judith recalled the home ec class in which pupils first sewed white cotton aprons and hats and then learned to cook parsley potatoes while wearing them. She recited a verse she had learned in the class, and never managed to forget, about the art of washing dishes:

  Rinse the shining crystal

  Then the silver bright

  Delicate cups and saucers

  We shall wash all right

  Next the china dishes

  Bowls and platters too

  Last the pots and pans

  And then we’re through.

  We talked about what life was like in New York during our girlhoods. Natives like us are a rare breed. We smile to ourselves at the people who come here from Ohio or Missouri and, within a year or two of their arrival, consider themselves echt New Yorkers. But they are! It is the avid people from somewhere else who fan the city’s extravagant flame as they scale its hierarchies of finance, commerce, and art. We indigenes with our proprietary airs are all very well, but we don’t count in the New York scheme of things, just as the Argosy doesn’t. The demolition of the squat building next door and the construction of its thirty-story replacement will soon begin. When that is completed, the Argosy will stand alone on the block of massive structures, like a wildflower that has found a bit of soil in a crack in the pavement. Godspeed, wonderful bookshop, on your journey into the uncertain future.