Nobody's Looking at You Read online

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  The antiquarian book business is a funny business. The people it caters to are not exactly non-readers, but they do not buy books just to read them, or even, in some cases, to read them at all. They are interested primarily in things surrounding books: their bindings, covers, paper, typefaces, age, condition, whether they are first editions, if they are signed by the author and if he or she is famous rather than the obscure schlub it is the destiny of most writers to remain or become. An example of a desirable book at the high end of the spectrum might be a well-preserved limited first edition of Ulysses. A lesser rarity is a signed copy of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. The Argosy deals in both the most expensive rarities (it currently offers a copy of the abovementioned Ulysses for sixty-five thousand dollars) and the lesser rarities, along with mere secondhand books at various levels of value. The Internet has been a stimulus for this trade. It has made it easier for collectors to collect; they can find rare books more readily than they could when only dealers’ catalogues were available. Thus, even though fewer people come to the shop itself today, sales have actually increased.

  But there is a melancholy that the sisters feel with particular sharpness at Christmastime. The bookstore used to be crowded with shoppers then. “We were usually too busy to talk to anyone,” Judith said. When I visited the shop during the week before Christmas, the sisters had something of the crestfallen air of the hosts of an unsuccessful party, who brighten when a guest comes in and subside into glumness as the evening wears on and the room remains unfilled. One day, I sat with Adina at the cash register as spurts of arriving customers alternated with lulls when the shop was almost empty. A man came in and asked for a copy of The Lady of the Lake to give his mother—and one was found, a nice old illustrated edition for a hundred and twenty-five dollars. Another man wanted a photography book for a hundred to a hundred and fifty dollars to give his boss, and Richard Avedon’s oversized book of inky pictures, called An Autobiography, was produced—and purchased for two hundred dollars. A middle-aged woman bought a history book with a handsome binding as a gift for a teacher for eighty dollars. A woman in her twenties bought a fifteen-dollar botanical print she had found in a rack. A couple approached the counter clutching books they had found on the bargain table outside the store. The greatest sale of the day was to a youngish millionaire who owns a factory in the Czech Republic and comes in every year to buy Christmas gifts for friends. He bought five rare books, for a total of eleven thousand dollars, among them a sixteenth-century architectural text and another copy of the Avedon Autobiography, which was worth several thousand dollars, because of the photographer’s careless scrawl on its first page.

  Late in the day, an elderly man entered the shop and asked for Naomi, who had helped him buy a gift the previous Christmas. He was looking for a print with a Steinway piano in it to give to a friend who worked at Steinway. The man had forgotten what Naomi remembered—that his last year’s gift was a print with a Steinway piano in it. Was this the same friend? The man said yes, and reluctantly agreed that a different print was in order. But he wanted it to be Steinway-related, and Naomi suggested that he and she go up to the print gallery, on the second floor, and see what there was—perhaps a picture of the Steinway factory in Astoria.

  The print gallery is the result of another of Lou Cohen’s impulse buys. In the early 1950s, he bought the Harry Stone gallery of American primitive art, on Madison Avenue, whose owner, a friend, was ill and could no longer run it. As Naomi tells it, “Lou bought the gallery but didn’t know what to do with it. He knew it was great. So he called my mother at home and said, ‘I have a job for you.’ My mother, who was a retired public-school teacher, said, ‘No, I don’t know anything about paintings and prints.’ He said, ‘You’re going to learn.’ She did learn.” (In Judith’s version, “Lou called my mother and said, ‘Can you come downtown?’ And she said, ‘My hair is in curlers, can it wait?’”) Over the years, under the mother’s skillful stewardship, the gallery thrived, and prints and maps rather than paintings became its dominant forms. It is now run by an attractive and enthusiastic young woman named Laura Ten Eyck, a Canadian printmaker and sculptor who came to New York in the nineties to do graduate work at N.Y.U. and found herself in need of a job.

  Laura recalls an interview with the sisters, who were looking for someone to assist their mother in the gallery. She was intimidated by them. “They sat there. They were so elegant, so intellectual. I had never met anybody like them before. Judith asked me, ‘Do you like older people?’ ‘Well, I have a grandmother.’” This was evidently the right answer. An interview with the mother, Ruth, who was known as Miss Shevin (her maiden name, which she used when she taught school, and kept), came next. “She was so chic,” Laura said. “She was in her late eighties, wearing a Chanel suit. She looked at me and only asked one thing—‘Where are you from?’ When I answered, she signaled the sisters that I was all right.” Laura had planned to leave after a year but has stayed for fifteen years. Miss Shevin taught her the print-and-map business, and she in turn was a tactful protective presence for Miss Shevin as she navigated the treacherous shoals of advanced old age. Miss Shevin worked at the Argosy until she was ninety-six and died two years later.

  Laura showed me a tiny room off a corridor that had been Miss Shevin’s private space, and which has been preserved, because no one could bear to dismantle it. Its walls are densely covered with small paintings and drawings, some of extremely high quality. A bookcase is tightly filled with old books, some rare and many on horticulture. (When Cohen bought a vacation house, in Croton Harmon, Miss Shevin, with her characteristic quickness, became an expert gardener.) A Persian carpet, a cot covered with a blue-and-white Indian spread, where Miss Shevin napped, and a plain wooden desk at which she wrote letters and which she would clear for lunch—brought from home and eaten with her husband—complete the furnishings of the little room, which so clearly evokes its owner and the time she lived in.

  I accompanied Naomi and the man with the Steinway friend to the print gallery, and watched as Laura unhurriedly leafed through folders in which an image of the Steinway factory in Astoria might appear, but didn’t. The man agreed on other possible subjects for his gift, and when Laura produced a number of folders filled with early-twentieth-century street maps of Queens, Naomi and I left them to their search and returned to the main floor.

  * * *

  Something bad had happened in our absence. Adina and Ben grimly reported that a signed copy of J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, worth four hundred dollars, had just been sold—had had to be sold—for the “$1” written on its flyleaf. “We don’t know where the guy found the book,” Ben said. “You or Judith must have done this,” Adina said to Naomi. Her accusation hung in the air for a moment and evaporated in the next. Naomi did not rise to the bait, she did not defend herself, there was no argument, there could be no argument. After the initial shock and impulse to blame someone for the error, there was complete, unspoken agreement among Adina, Ben, and Naomi (Judith had left for the day) that peace must be maintained. I had been afforded a glimpse into the workings of the mechanism by which the Argosy maintains its remarkable homeostasis. When I questioned Ben about the incident, he said, “We try not to mess up. But we handle books very quickly. The little drama you overheard—someone got a great deal. He was very lucky. Someone was going too fast—we don’t quite know what happened. But it happens. And it’s not a big deal.”

  Unlike his mother and his aunts, who always come to work stylishly dressed, Ben wears casual clothes and has a manner that is at once laid-back and mildly ironic. He is tall and slender, and has curly black hair. “I’m the young whippersnapper,” he said when I asked him about his life at the bookshop. “I’m a partner, but I’m the junior partner. And it’s my mother, so it’s a little bit of a dance. You can’t scream at your boss. You can sort of scream at your mother. And it goes both ways. I’m sure I irritate her at times. Not as an employee but as a son. It’s challenging.
But it’s fun. It adds a whole layer of complexity to this job.”

  Ben did not come to the bookstore straight from college. He spent eleven years in Colorado as “a ski person—I won’t say bum.” Finally, he said, he grew bored, and he returned to New York at the time of Ruth Shevin’s final illness, when “the girls were thinking about the next generation—the third generation—and it was up to myself, not so much to my brother, Nicholas, who was occupied elsewhere, and to Zack, to see if we could keep this thing going.” Zack is Naomi’s son, who works in his mother’s autographs-and-letters department. Nicholas is the president of Swann Auction Galleries, founded by Louis Cohen’s nephew Benjamin Swann (né Schwamenfeld) in 1941 and purchased by his father, George Lowry, in 1969. He also hesitated before joining the family business. After college, he spent four years in Prague, where he taught English and, among other ventures, wrote a restaurant guide and ran a take-out sandwich business.

  I asked Ben if he had known his grandfather. “Yes, I knew him very well,” Ben replied. “He was very peaceful, soft-spoken, but decisive. He was the heart of this place, and then when the girls took over, when they started to take control from him, he was resistant to some of the modern newfangled stuff they were suggesting. Now they may be somewhat resistant to me.”

  “What do you do that’s different from what your mother and aunts do?”

  “Not so very much. When I first came, I said, ‘I’ll work on your online presence. That will be my foot in the door, and we’ll see how that goes and how I like it and how you like me.’” Ben still does a lot of work on the website that he established for the Argosy, and on the orders that come in through it, but he has also become knowledgeable about the book business, as his mother and aunts did, simply by being at the bookstore every day and by going out on book-buying expeditions.

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  When the sisters speak of book-buying expeditions, they grow excited. The acquisition of books is the activity that lies at the center of their enterprise. It is to them what trials are to litigators, operations are to surgeons. This is where their knowledge and talent are tested. “It’s the kind of knowledge it has taken us decades to be comfortable with,” Naomi said. “You must know the values of books inside out. You must be able to look at a bookshelf and recognize the one good book on it. There are still libraries we could walk into and not know what to do with.” She spoke of a library of six thousand books she had just bought. “I couldn’t resist. There were enough valuable books to make buying the whole library worthwhile.” The Argosy can buy whole libraries because it has the storage space to do so. This gives it an advantage over dealers who have room only for valuable books. (Today, the Strand Bookstore is the Argosy’s only serious local competitor for whole libraries.) After winnowing out the first editions and rare and otherwise desirable books, the chaff is sent to the cellar or put out in the arcade, either on the central table, where there is an array of books for ten dollars or three dollars or five dollars on changing subjects (art, cooking, history, biography, mysteries, say), or in a pair of bookcases in back marked “Sale $1.”

  I asked Naomi if I could accompany her and her sisters on a book-buying trip, and she said yes. But the next day Judith, in her big sister’s wisdom, vetoed the idea and persuaded Naomi and Adina of its unwiseness. “We don’t know how you could understand how we decide so quickly,” Naomi said when she told me of the change of heart. She added that they don’t want to make public what they pay for a library. However, perhaps to soften the refusal, the sisters allowed me to come along on two expeditions that they evidently felt would not expose their expertise to misjudgment or betray any secrets of the trade. One was to a hoarder’s apartment, where they bought some posters and a few books out of kindness and pity for the deranged woman who lived there. The other was to the Riverdale apartment of a woman who had been an avant-garde dancer in the 1920s and had died at the age of a hundred and three. Naomi and I drove to Riverdale to see the small library she had left, which the person dismantling the apartment described as filled with rare art books. We entered a place of chaos and sad dirtiness. Naomi saw at a glance that she did not want to buy the dancer’s library and told the dismantler so. She said she would pay a hundred and fifty dollars for ten or fifteen books she would select and carry away in a couple of shopping bags, and the offer was accepted. Among her sharp-eyed choices were a book of Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings, a volume of Nabokov’s stories, and a copy of The Catcher in the Rye.

  * * *

  Nicholas Lowry’s choice of Prague as the destination for his flight from the nest probably gave his parents less pause than Ben’s choice of Vail did, and may have been overdetermined. “My husband is Czech,” Judith told me during a talk in her fifth-floor room. “He came to this country in 1941, at the age of nine, by way of France and then Portugal. His father had a business that made thermometers and thermos bottles. His mother’s family business made rubber gloves, baby-bottle nipples, and condoms. They were the biggest condom sellers in Europe.

  “When George’s parents came to America, they decided they shouldn’t be Jewish, because it wasn’t a good thing to be. They had had to convert to Catholicism in order to leave Portugal, and didn’t practice any religion after they arrived here. And, just as some children can’t ask their parents about sex, George and his brother felt that they couldn’t ask their parents about religion. So when I was dating George—I assumed he was Jewish, he looked Jewish, his friends were Jewish—he came to my house one day and saw Hanukkah candles and said, ‘What’s that?’ ‘Those are Hanukkah candles,’ I said. ‘Aren’t you Jewish?’ And he said, ‘Well, yes, I mean no, I mean I think part of me is Jewish.’ ‘Well, which part do you think?’ He said, ‘Well, my mother, my father, I’m not sure.’ I said, ‘Why don’t you ask them?’ So he did, and, of course, they were both Jewish.” Judith added that George, in his innocence, told the rabbi who married them that he wanted to convert. “The rabbi said, ‘You don’t have to. You’re Jewish.’”

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  After “the little drama” of the Coetzee book, Naomi went over to the books sitting in piles along a ledge beneath a bookcase, which it is her chosen task to evaluate and place within the bookshop. “Who shall live and who shall die,” she said merrily as she picked up a copy of a novel by E. L. Doctorow, looked at it for a moment, and sent it to its death in the basement, where books that are considered of no special value—ordinary secondhand books—are sold. The books that Naomi was judging were what she called books for reading, as opposed to books for collecting. The books for collecting had already been marked for such destinations as the fifth-floor first-editions room, or a room on the fourth floor called the 900 Room, where rare old books are kept, or the fifth-floor Americana room, or the shelves of fancy leather-bound books on the mezzanine.

  The books on the ledge that escape the fate of the Doctorow novel will go into one of the bookcases on the ground floor that carry labels such as “Children’s Books,” “Poetry,” “Philosophy,” “Gardening,” and “Select Reading.” The last named is a large miscellany of works of fiction and nonfiction, arranged in alphabetical order, of which Naomi is the curator. The criteria by which she determines who shall drown and who shall go to “Select Reading” are partly but not wholly determined by the literary worth of the text and by the condition of the book; the author’s rising or falling reputation will often tip the balance. “There are not enough requests for Iris Murdoch,” Naomi said as she sent a nice copy of A Severed Head to the basement. “Not many people ask for Coover”; “Barth is not asked for enough”; “No one asks for Mary Lee Settle”; and “No one has ever asked for Voinovich” were other of her comments about the refusés. Among those who made the cut that day were T. S. Eliot (The Cocktail Party), Dickens (Hard Times), Truman Capote (Other Voices, Other Rooms and The Grass Harp), Philip Roth (Portnoy’s Complaint), and Hemingway (Death in the Afternoon).

  All three sisters had made a point of saying how much they liked their job
s. “I can’t tell you how much we love being here every single day,” Naomi said. “I cannot wait to get to work.” As I stood with her at the ledge, watching her at her task of assessment—sometimes even offering an opinion when she hesitated—I caught some of her pleasure and excitement. The work of the bookshop is indeed agreeable work. You could even say that it isn’t real work. It has none of the monotony and difficulty and anxiety of work. The cartons of books are like boxes of chocolates. Each book is a treat to be savored. That the treats are the end product of what most writers consider an arduous if not downright torturous activity perhaps only adds to their deliciousness. Each book that comes into the shop raises the interesting question of where it should go and what it is worth. The sisters serenely draw on their knowledge and taste (“Sometimes we throw Hitler things in the garbage,” Naomi said) to determine the answers. They are proud of their success in carrying on the family business and aware of the mystique that attaches to the old-book trade. Children who inherit slaughterhouses or factories that manufacture incontinence products may not feel as blessed.