THE SIGNAL from David Katznelson
“To assert dignity is to lose it.”― Rex Stout
I am probably late to the party here, but watched The Booksellers documentary late last night on a whim. It was great to learn more about the bookstore scene in New York on 4th Avenue—I loved Fran Lebowitz’s commentary throughout helping to bring to life what it felt like to walk amongst the great booksellers of her time. But for me, the best part of the documentary was to see a few shots of the now-closed Gotham Book Mart.
Geoffrey Weiss first took me to Gotham in the nineties. We both worked at Warner Bros. Records, he was the product manager of most of my acts, and we were both in New York for either a CMJ convention or the New Music Seminar. He knew I loved Edward Gorey, and Gotham exclusively sold his prints and first editions. Geoffrey planned a great hang-over morning for us, arranging for us to dine at one of the now-extinct Jewish kosher dairies of NYC and then to trip to midtown to visit Gotham.
Gotham Book Mart was everything you would want in a bookstore: a small-ish space crammed floor to ceiling with books sitting in dark wooden shelves. You could feel the presence of John Updike and other New York iconic writers perusing the isles in search of inspiration—a place where the James Joyce Society could meet and do some candlelit digging into the mind-knots of Ulysses. The two of us were greeted by owner Andreas Brown, who knew Geoffrey and warmly brought us upstairs to where we could view the Gorey for-sale prints. For anyone who loved books and the stories behind them, Brown was an incredible character to meet. Just talking about Edward Gorey led to a laundry list of novels and poetry recommendations, enough to fill one’s reading time for the next year to come. Literary history seeped from the walls of Gotham, and Brown was the caretaker.
I bought several prints from Gotham during my many trips to the store…as well as many of the books Brown recommended. The Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer: that was his best gift to me. It was around 1997 that Brown suggested that Tranströmer was one of the greats of our generation and would surely win the Nobel Prize in the upcoming years (it was awarded to him in 2011).
In 2008 I was on a business trip in New York and as usual planned out my trip to the Gotham Book Mart. I arrived to find it closed….the windows boarded up, the great sign depicting the fisherman, using books for bait to catch the wise fish, that adorned its entrance, gone. It had been closed for months, yet for me it was a new, hard-hitting loss. As The Booksellers documentary discusses, the vibrant bookstore scene of New York city had collapsed, and Gotham was one of victims of the times.
I visited San Francisco’s Green Apple Books recently, where my friend Mary Gorey is the manager. Green Apple is one of the country’s best bookstores and despite surviving the first long pandemic wave, is still seeing a shrinking business during this time. Green Apple cannot be a victim like Gotham. Nor can City Lights, Point Reyes Books or any of the great bookstores that make up such a vital part of our civilization. As we hit the holiday season, support your local bookstore!! We all need good new books, and the bookstores are at the heart of where they live, waiting to be discovered.
Thank you Josh Rosenthal for this incredible oral history of Electra. They interview a few friends (SUE DREW!!!!)…a few legends…and tell an incredible story. This is a wonderful piece of music history told by the people who lived it.
Peter Thiel backs Berlin start-up making psychedelics in $125 million round
It is funny: conservative people have been some of the biggest funders of psychedelic research over the years. My late friend Matthew Mellon was a big believer in psychedelics as a major player in the mental health field.
Preserved Remains of Two Discovered at Pompeii, Yielding New Insights into Vesuvius Eruption
A wonderful, big time musicologist, collector and scholar has left us.
AFTER A DEATH
By Tomas Tranströmer
Once there was a shock
that left behind a long, shimmering comet tail.
It keeps us inside. It makes the TV pictures snowy.
It settles in cold drops on the telephone wires.
One can still go slowly on skis in the winter sun
through brush where a few leaves hang on.
They resemble pages torn from old telephone directories.
Names swallowed by the cold.
It is still beautiful to feel the heart beat
but often the shadow seems more real than the body.
The samurai looks insignificant
beside his armour of black dragon scales.
