A Book Shop Owner As Stuntman

Illustration by Arnold M. Herr ©2016

At the Megalopolis Book Shop, Mickey Tsimmis was all about customer service. No matter how potentially catastrophic the request (i.e. pulling a book from the shelves), Mickey was ready to sacrifice his life to help out. Coolly insouciant (or idiotic), he ignored the peril that was routine while navigating through the thicket that was Megalopolis. Danger was his business and to satisfy a customer no obstacle was too great to overcome. Scaling the shelves was an Olympic event in his jungle jumble of books, where organization was overrated and safety was for sissies.

Illustration from The Wild Ride of a Hollywood Bookdealer by Arnold M. Herr, "one of the wildest rides since Thompson and Steadman (or perhaps Mr. Toad) took to the highway."

"Screamingly funny" (Bookstore Memories). 

Herr, Arnold M. The Wild Ride of a Hollywood Bookdealer. Berkeley: Poltroon Press in association with Booktryst, 2016. Octavo. Photo-illustrated wrappers. 136 pp. Illustrations by the author. BUY NOW.

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A Rare & Used Book Shop Owner's Lament

Illustration by Arnold M. Herr ©2016

Poor Mickey Tsimmis, his innocence lost in cruel Hollywood, the burg without mercy, the hamlet of vulgarity, the city without a soul. It's Despairsville, man, a drag and a half. But relief and change you could believe in were routinely found at his Megalopolis Book Shop on Melrose Ave. east of La Brea, west of the moon, south of no north.

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Illustration from The Wild Ride of a Hollywood Bookdealer by Arnold M. Herr, "one of the wildest rides since Thompson and Steadman (or perhaps Mr. Toad) took to the highway."

Herr, Arnold M. The Wild Ride of a Hollywood Bookdealer. Berkeley: Poltroon Press in association with Booktryst, 2016. Octavo. Photo-illustrated wrappers. 136 pp. Illustrations by the author. BUY NOW.
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Apologies to Kay Nielsen and Charles Bukowski.
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A Legend in the Hollywood Book Trade

by Stephen J. Gertz

The following appears as the Preface to this just published collaboration of Poltroon Press and Booktryst.

 

 There are legends in the Los Angeles rare and used book trade.

In 1905, Ernest Dawson established L.A.’s first book shop exclusively devoted to rare books. Continued by his equally respected sons, Glen and Muir, the shop remained in business for 105 years. From the 1920s through the 1970s, Jake Zeitlin ran a rare book shop that became a locus for fine printing and local artists and typographers. A Texan by birth, Stanley Rose migrated to Los Angeles in the 1920s and began in the trade by peddling books on a push cart through the writers’ buildings at the movie studios  He opened a shop on Hollywood Blvd. that became a hangout for screenwriters and local and visiting novelists. Rose had a back room that after the shop closed in the evenings became an “art studies” salon that concentrated on studying the nude female form, comely models provided for the students’ edification and attention to detail. Rose was also notorious for selling clandestine erotica, and published a few one-handers written by starving screenwriters.  In the early 1960s, the Weinstein brothers established a junk store in Compton, CA that sold used books in addition to dross. Ultimately focusing exclusively on books, they developed their business into the most successful rare book firm in the world with final headquarters in a former mortuary to the stars in West Hollywood.

And then there was the late Eli Goodman (1925-2016) of Cosmopolitan Book Shop on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles. Established in 1958, Cosmopolitan was Hollywood’s oldest used bookstore. A luminary in the shade of the Los Angeles rare book trade, Eli Goodman was a legend based strictly on eccentric character. And he was a character, one too singularly colorful to have been invented; a novelist could not have dreamed-up the man.

Refusing to ever retire, he never did. His final promotion on the Cosmopolitan website was a calculated plea for mercy and desperate tug on the heartstrings: “I’M 91 YEARS OLD – PLEASE HELP ME!  TAKE MY WONDERFUL BOOKS FOR PENNIES ON THE DOLLAR!”

If Eli’s long-time assistant, amanuensis, and literary voice, Arnold Herr, is not exactly James Boswell, Eli Goodman will never be confused with Samuel Johnson - except for their pure love of books. Eli Goodman - within these pages “Mickey Tsimmis” - was passionate about them.

Parts of this book were originally published in the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America (ABAA) newsletter and later episodes on my blog-site for rare books, Booktryst.com. They are collected here, as they were on Booktryst, in serial form but with additional material not found in the online edition [now offline]. The episodes are based on journal entries made by Mr. Herr over many years. Some end with a cliff-hanger. The dangler could be Eli or Arnold hanging onto a steep, flimsy bookshelf for dear life - or somebody trying to hang onto their sanity.

In the 19th century, color-plate books were often “heightened with gum arabic” (as described in bookseller catalogues) to intensify the colors and provide a light sheen. It’s fair to say that the stories herein have been heightened. But it would be misleading to characterize them as tall-tales. They are not. But Mr. Herr was clearly wearing lifts in his shoes while writing them down.

I could go on about Eli Goodman, who I only knew from experience, and Arnold Herr, who has been a friend for many years. But there’s a guy wedged in a truck tire rolling down the street in my direction frantically waving his arms and shouting, “Get out of the way!” And so, hello, I must be going.

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HERR, Arnold M. The Wild Ride of a Hollywood Bookdealer. Berkeley: Poltroon Press in association with Booktryst, 2016. Octavo. Photo-illustrated wrappers. 136 pp. Cover photo by Shelly Vogel. BUY NOW. 

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The Amazon Of The American Revolution

by Stephen J. Gertz

I "burst the tyrant bounds which held my sex in awe."

The Female Review: or, memoirs of an American young lady whose life and character are peculiarly distinguished - being a Continental soldier (for nearly three years) in the late American War, during which she performed the duties of every department into which she was called with punctual exactness, fidelity, and honor. By a citizen of Massachusetts. Portrait engraved by Graham. Dedham: Printed by Nathaniel and Benjamin Heaton, for the author, 1797.

"The subject of this memoir was born at Plympton, Mass. in 1760. Disguised as a man, she enlisted in the Revolutionary Army (Fourth Mass. Regiment) under the name Robert Shurtleff, and was wounded in a skirmish at Tarrytown, N.Y. She was also present at Yorktown" (From a Boston bookseller's catalog c. 1916).

"There are few cases known to history, of women serving as soldiers, without discovery of their sex, but all, save our heroine, were in foreign armies: she remains the only one known to our own army, until 1861-65, when according to Mrs. Livermore's My Story of the War [Hartford, Conn.: A.D. Worthington and Company. 1888], there were many in the Union Army, by one unnamed authority almost four hundred - though of course none were enlisted if their sex was known.

"It is admitted that there were two women in Washington's army who did soldier's work - Molly Pitcher of Monmouth, and Margaret Corbin of Fort Washington - But theirs was but a 'service of occasion,' and they were not regularly enlisted, as was Deborah Sampson" (Editor's note to 1916 edition).

Deborah Sampson (1760-1827) was born the daughter of impoverished farmers who claimed distinguished lineage from the early Pilgrims. Bound out as an indentured servant as a child, she became literate and taught school for six months after her indenture ended in 1779. She was five feet seven inches - tall for a girl of that era - and, according to observers, possessed a sturdy physique and was strong.

"A more headstrong and even reckless aspect to Sampson's nature appeared during the year 1782. Inspired by the events of the American Revolution, she dressed in men's clothing and enlisted in the Massachusetts militia forces under the assumed name of Timothy Thayer. Caught soon afterward and exposed as a woman masquerading in men's clothes, she was forced to yield the bounty money that was customarily paid to enlistees during that period of the revolutionary war. Unhindered by this initial setback, and rejecting a suitor who was favored by her mother, Sampson dressed in men's clothing once again and on 20 May 1782 enlisted in the Fourth Massachusetts Regiment in Uxbridge, Massachusetts, under the assumed name of Robert Shurtlieff (given variously in other sources as Shirtliff, Shurtleff, or Shirtlief). Mustered in Worcester, Massachusetts, on 23 May 1782, she marched southward to West Point, New York, as a member of the Continental army.

"Sampson saw considerable action during her year and a half in the American forces (20 May 1782-23 Oct. 1783). She took part in a battle against American Loyalists near Tarrytown, New York, where she was wounded in the thigh. Treated by a French surgeon in the American army, she extracted a musket ball from her thigh [with penknife and needle] rather than have her gender discovered. Around this same time she suffered the indignity of having the First Baptist Church of Middleborough, Massachusetts, sever its connections with her, citing her 'very loose and unchristian like' behavior" (American National Biography).

She continued her service in the Continental Army through war's end. For a brief period immediately afterward she continued to pose as a man, under the name Ephraim Sampson. But in 1784 she married Benjamin Gannett, settled down, and bore three children. Sampson suffered from the effects of her war wounds, and experienced financial difficulties.

She solicited assistance from her friend and neighbor in Canton, Massachusetts, Paul Revere, who wrote letters in her behalf, and may have provided direct financial support. Sampson was placed on the pension list of the United States in 1805 (retroactive to 1803) as the result of her petitions and the pleading of Revere.

Title page, 1916 reprint, Tarrytown, N.Y. : William Abbatt.

The diary she kept of her exploits as a soldier was lost when, returning to West Point, the boat she was in capsized. She told her wartime stories to Herman Mann, a printer, publisher, and editorial writer for the Dedham. Massachusetts Village Register.

"He interviewed her, and after much persuasion she agreed to let him write her story, with his promise that she would have the final say…but  there is reason to believe that Deborah never did get final review. Mann arranged for a list of subscribers to pay costs and promised Deborah a share of the profits, but it seems she did not receive much of these. He commissioned Joseph Stone of Framingham, Massachusetts, to paint Deborah's picture for a frontispiece for the book" (Bohrer, Glory, Passion, and Principle: The Story of Eight Remarkable Women at the Core of the American Revolution, p. 208).

Mann was loose with facts, added his own "moral reflections," and with his own vivid imagery and fanciful hyperbole related her experiences. As a result, the book is now considered to be more the product of his pen than Sampson's direct memories; his words, not hers. Mann even spelled her surname incorrectly: it is "Samson," no "p."

A more accurate recounting of Deborah Samson's exploits can be found in The Women of the American Revolution by Elizabeth F. Ellet (NY, Baker and Scribner, 1848). In the Preface, Ellet notes, "I have been told that the Female Review about this heroine was not in any measure reliable and that Deborah Samson repeatedly expressed her displeasure at the representation of herself which she did not at all recognize. The following facts respecting her I received from a lady who knew her personally and has often listened with thrilling interest to the animated description given by herself of her exploits and adventures."

In 1802 Deborah Samson began public speaking to theater audiences in New England and New York; she was the first professional woman lecturer in the United States. Billed as "The American Heroine" and wearing a blue and white uniform and armed with a musket, she performed military manual exercises while relating how she had 'burst the tyrant bounds which held my sex in awe.' The remainder of her life was uneventful.

"Sampson's wartime service was both sensational and remarkable. The activities of this American 'Joan of Arc' were in many ways more extraordinary than the heroics of persons such as Betsy Ross and Molly Pitcher. First, Sampson's military service was reasonably well documented; second, she took obvious pride and pleasure in both her service and in the manner of her disguise; and third, she attracted the attention of a revolutionary notable, Revere. Even in her own day, a Massachusetts newspaper marveled at the story of a 'lively, comely young nymph, nineteen years of age, dressed in man's apparel,' serving in the armies of the revolutionary cause" (Davis, "A 'Gallantress' Gets Her Due: The Earliest Published Notice of Deborah Sampson," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 91, no. 2 (1981): p. 322). "As was the case with many heroes and heroines of the Revolution, Deborah Sampson Gannett's name faded from the public memory by the mid-nineteenth century" (American National Biography).

Lost in obscurity Deborah Samson was rediscovered by the feminist movement during the late 1960s. In 1983 Deborah Samson was formally proclaimed "Official Heroine of the State of Massachusetts."

The first edition of The Female Review is quite rare; according to ABPC only two copies have come to auction within the last thirty-seven years. Only one copy of the 1866 reprint has seen the auction rooms during the same period. There are no copies of the 1797, 1866, or 1916 (with biographical corrections) editions currently being offered by anyone, anywhere in the world; the book is as scarce as can be.

But for those interested in reading this tale of the American Revolution's amazon in male drag the full text is available online.

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[SAMPSON, Deborah] [MANN, Herman]. The Female Review: or, memoirs of an American young lady whose life and character are peculiarly distinguished - being a Continental soldier (for nearly three years) in the late American War, during which she performed the duties of every department into which she was called with punctual exactness, fidelity, and honor. By a citizen of Massachusetts. Portrait engraved by Graham. Dedham: Printed by Nathaniel and Benjamin Heaton, for the author, 1797.

First edition. Twelvemo. xv, [16]-258, [8] pp. Frontispiece portrait by Stone, engraved by Graham.

Sabin 44314.

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First Dibs On That Book: A Poetic Meditation On The Landscape of Memory

by Alastair Johnston

Mohammed Dib, Tlemcen or Places of Writing, translated from the French by Guy Bennett, Los Angeles: Otis Books/Seismicity Editions, 2012, 115 pp., paperback, perfectbound, $12.95

The kindness of strangers is legendary, but when you are used to getting books, manuscripts and CDs in the mail you are not always grateful, or aware of their significance. Last April I got a copy of The Poems of Luxorius translated by my friend Art Beck, sent to me from Otis Books, which are published by the Graduate Writing Program of Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. They decided to add a bonus to the package, the book discovered here.

(To make a long story even longer: Last week I had a dentist appointment and had to take public transport there and back, a journey of an hour each way, an experience always improved by a good book. My Hazlitt volume was too big to fit in a pocket so I grabbed the small slim volume of Dib off the shelf where it had been sitting patiently waiting to be sorted into sell, give away or read later).

The cover is black, a matte black that is eventually going to be covered in scuffs and fingerprints, and the book contains some murky square photos, also very black. A good book needs no photos to sell it, I thought, especially badly reproduced ones. But then I got it: these are Dib's photos, amateurish mementos of his past. He took them in his hometown of Tlemcin, Algeria, in 1946. In 1957 he was exiled and spent the rest of his life away from his homeland, writing about it. Like James Joyce, like H. C. Earwicker -- like everybody! So this work is a poetic meditation on the landscape of memory and the unknowable trajectory of life. 

"Why worry about order and coherence if we don't have to? Memory knows no such concerns and we are strolling through a memory."

By the time I got home from the dentist I had finished the book and decided to read it again. I was ignorant of Mohammed Dib (1920–2003) until I read this slim poetic work. The web tells us, "Dib, who was at various times a teacher, accountant, rug maker, journalist, and drama critic, wrote of the poor Algerian worker and peasant in his early realistic novels." Coming across those old photos had started him thinking about where he had come from. Some of the people in his photos look pretty downtrodden, and I thought Algeria was a hot country. They look bundled up against the cold. His own family look a bit more comfortable, or maybe these shots were taken on special occasions, weddings and birthdays. And the black and white murky photos come to life as he paints them in for us:

"A few colors. Less for brightening up the photograph than to get us dreaming. The floor is a mosaic of olive-green tiles (so typically Arabo-Andalusian) on the one hand, and tiles the white of Chinese porcelain on the other…. The checkerboard they form is contained in a wide, dark red frame. The walls are paneled with azulejos in the grand tradition: blue motif on white background, repeated from tile to tile. You feel it has the moist transparency of a child's eye.
   "And green is the grape vine whose trunk stretches ever upward, plunging the patio into green shade."

He asks what the role of the writer is. It must be more than just a function to produce text. He has a set of references which he hopes coincides with those of the reader. Coming to the text, both writer and reader are looking for a space of freedom, he says. It's up to both to discover common ground, because once the work of writing is finished it disowns the author and leads a life of its own. Whimsically he suggests that critics and "people with master's degrees" need to open up these spaces of freedom once more, by which I think he means interpret the codes of a writer's work so they speak to all readers. Everyman as Augustine or Jerome?

From children's games (which are universal) to taking bread to be baked at the communal oven, Dib paints a portrait of a bygone time and a bygone lad he no longer recognizes: the 8-year-old whippersnapper in a bowtie and kalpak (one of those wooly cylindrical hats). "Such is the oddball that faces or rather confronts me. I can't get over it, the bow tie in particular delights me. And scandalizes me."

Other kids roamed the streets; some were already working. He went to school, which was run by the French colonial government. "And today French is a language that Algerians are not averse to speaking. I myself began as a school teacher in this language, which far from making me French made me more Algerian."

He takes us back to the market, "La Médresse," destroyed by the French because it might harbor terrorists. Nothing could be more unlikely: it was just a collection of gaily painted stands selling fruits and vegetables brought from the countryside, "paintings the Fauves would have been proud of." He recounts the trips with his grandmother to this market, the intoxicating odors, how she would haggle so much over an apricot it would drive the stall-holders to distraction. "That's it, old woman, shop's closed! I'm going straight home to bed!" Another destroyed neighborhood, Bab Sidi Boumédiène, was home to story-tellers. Though illiterate, these men told tales from memory that the author later discovered were from the Thousand and One Nights. "Story-telling is still forbidden: these people of the word may once have delivered subversive messages, and could still be doing so today."

"Just opposite there was a flourishing flea market where you would also happen upon the greatest concentration of fortune tellers. But it seemed they were only there for the infantrymen of the Gourmalah barracks, who could be identified by the pronounced fondness they had for the girls -- they monopolized every one. When you saw the proud soldiers hold them close, you had to wonder if they were having their palms read or whispering sweet nothings into their ears. Allah alone knows and, as for me, I was too young to approach these big women, girls from the South they said, in order to find out. Incredibly, they wore no veils and their faces were amazingly covered with tattoos, their burning eyes ringed with kohl."

But the whole neighborhood was torched by the French, along with Le Médresse: 

"Not only did this result in the physical disappearance of a place, but also of trades and professional practices, whose bell tolled at the same time. Neither would survive. As the cluster of shacks went up in smoke, the local customs were also immolated, and the traditions and spirit that gave rise to them vanished, too."

Dib's writing makes me want to go there, tempt the fates again that found me lost in the Nubian desert. (I pause to put on Musique Tagnawite by Mahmoud Guinia.) There are no bugs in the desert, no insects, nothing lives there. You can lay down in the sand and look at the stars until you fall asleep. But it's better to travel at night and look for shade during the day. Then I remember that as the world is more and more divided into haves and have-nots, it is increasingly impossible for us first worlders to wander unremarked into the Sahara, the world's largest desert. It's not only on Algeria's doorstep "but also within us, in the dark refuge."

 "The three revealed religions were born in the desert. Three religions that conceal others, many others, that were also revealed there. Let us keep that in mind so as not to forget that the desert is the blank page on which anything can be written, or anything erased.
   "Only it happens that not one religion was born in the Sahara. Our desert is a true blank page. Is it meant to remain a blank page? Based on what we know, we can say that this page is spreading further and further in all directions.
   "The blank page is not only something we can write on. It is also something your destiny can appear to you on, write itself on.
   "All Algerians know geomancy, the art of divination. The geomancer draws signs in the sand and you wait for the omen."

Because of my love for North African music I am drawn to his description of a festival: "Then come the Gnawa (the Blacks). In a thunder of enormous drums, their iron krakebs clack like the beaks of a thousand robotic storks." I can hear it! And now I can see it too. Blurry family snaps, girls in their finery (recalling Lehnert & Landrock's Rêves d'Orient), arty architectural shots, suddenly it all starts to come into focus. We cannot go there, except on the flying carpet of Dib's words. But he falters:

"You haven't said everything you thought you did, and what you did you didn't say well.
   "… Again to try your luck. From that time on you cannot escape the call of the work to be rewritten. Which will be perfect this time."

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The Wild-Ride Journal of a Hollywood Bookseller

 

 Now available in book form, with new material not found in the online edition, original illustrations by the author, and a preface by yours truly, Stephen J. Gertz.

HERR, Arnold M. The Wild Ride of a Hollywood Bookseller. Berkeley: Poltroon Press in Association with Booktryst, 2016. Octavo. Photo-illustrated wrappers. $21.95. BUY NOW.

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