3 How to Get Started in the Book Business
I had decided to become a bookseller because I loved good books. I assumed there must be many others who shared a love for reading and that I could minister to their needs. I thought of this as a calling. It never occurred to me to investigate bookselling as a business.
Had I done so, I should have learned that eighty percent of all the hardcover books purchased across the counter in America are sold by twenty booksellers. If I had been given the facts and sat down with pencil and paper, I could have discovered that to earn a living and continue to build the kind of inventory that would make it possible to go on selling, I would need to have an annual gross in the neighborhood of $100,000!
Even if I had had the facts in hand, they would not have deterred me. If vows of poverty were necessary, I was ready to take them. And I refused to be distressed by the expressions on people’s faces when I confided that I was about to make a living selling books. Sell freight, yes. Sell bonds or stocks or insurance, certainly. Sell pots and pans. But books!
And I was not only going to sell books—I was going to sell real books: those that dealt seriously and truly with the spirit of man.
I had finished cleaning and decorating my little shop before it dawned on me that I did not know how to go about the next step: getting a stock of books and records to sell. A study of the classified telephone directory revealed the names of very few publishers that sounded at all familiar. Was it possible there were no publishers in Chicago? If that were the case, would I have to go to New York?
There was a telephone listing for Little, Brown and Company, so I called them. The lady there said she would be glad to see me. She proved to be very kind and very disillusioning.
“No,” she said, “the book business is not easy, and your location is bad. No, the big publishers will not sell to you direct because your account is too small. No, we at Little, Brown won’t either. If I were you, I’d forget the whole idea and go back to teaching.”
Everything was No. But she did tell me where I could buy books of all publishers wholesale, and that was the information I wanted. I hastened to A. C. McClurg’s and presented myself to the credit manager.
The fact that I had a shop, nicely decorated, did not seem to qualify me for instant credit. First I would have to fill out an application and await the results of an investigation. In the meantime if I wanted books, I could buy them for cash.
“All right,” I said. “I want to buy three hundred dollars worth of books.”
“That isn’t very much,” the man said. “How big is your store?”
“Well,” I said, “it’s fifteen feet long and nine feet wide, and I’m going to carry records, too.”
He shook his head and, with a sidewise glance, asked, “What did you say your name was?” Then, still apparently somewhat shattered, he directed me to a salesman.
I launched into my buying terribly, terribly happy, yet filled with all sorts of misgivings. Was I selecting the right books? And who would I sell them to? But I had only to touch their brand new shiny jackets to restore my confidence. I remember buying Jules Romain’s Men of Good Will. In fifteen years, I never sold a copy. I’m still trying. I bought Knut Hamson, Thomas Mann, Sigrid Undset, Joseph Hergesheimer, Willa Cather, Henry James—as much good reading as I could obtain for $298.49. I was promised delivery as soon as the check cleared.
When the books arrived on a Saturday morning, it was like a first love affair. I waited breathlessly as the truck drew up, full of books for my shop. It wasn’t full at all, of course—not for me, anyway. My books were contained in a few modest boxes. And I had built shelves all the way up to the ceiling!
Again, a moment of panic. Enough, my heart said. Stay in the dream! What’s next?
The next step was to get recordings. In this field, at least, I found that all the major companies had branch offices in Chicago. I called Columbia records and was told they’d send me a salesman.
He arrived a few days later, blue eyed and blond haired, an interesting man with a sad message. “No, we can’t open you up,” he said. “It’s out of the question. Your store is in direct conflict with Lyon and Healy on the Avenue. So there’s no question about it, we can’t give you a franchise. We won’t. Decca won’t. And I’m sure RCA won’t.”
I was overcome with rage. Didn’t he know I had fought to keep this country free? Wasn’t there such a thing as free enterprise? Didn’t I have a right to compete in a decent and honorable manner? If I couldn’t get records one way, I’d get them another, I assured him. Strangely enough, he seemed to like my reaction. Later he was able to help me.
But for the present, I was reduced to borrowing more money from my brother-in-law with which to buy off-beat recordings from an independent distributor. I brought my own phonograph from home and my typewriter and settled down to the long wait for the first customer.
How do you get going in a business of which you have no practical knowledge and which inherently is a doomed undertaking to begin with? The only answer is that you must be favored with guardian angels.
The first one to bring a flutter of hope into my life came into it on a September afternoon at a luncheon affair, under I do not know what auspices, for Chicago authors. There I encountered a distinguished looking white-haired gentleman, tall but with the sloping back of a literary man, standing mildly in a corner. I introduced myself to Vincent Starrett, bibliophile and Sherlock Holmes scholar. He listened attentively to my account of myself and took my phone number. A few days later he called to ask for more information about my idea of combining the sale of books and records.
I pointed out that it was easy, for example, to sell a copy of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt if the customer was familiar with Grieg’s incidental music for the play. Besides, reading and listening were closely allied activities. Anyone with literary tastes could or should have equivalent tastes in music. It was logical to sell a record at the same time you sold a book. Mr. Starrett thought this was a fine idea, and to my shocked surprise, wrote a paragraph about me in his column in the Book Section of the Chicago Sunday Tribune.
The Monday after the write-up appeared, I could hardly wait to get to the shop. I expected it would be flooded with people. It wasn’t. The phone didn’t even ring. I was disappointed, but still felt that hidden forces were working in the direction of my success. Mr. Starrett’s kind words were a turning point for me—I no longer felt anonymous.
Some people did see the write-up—intelligent, charming, good people, such as I had imagined gathering in my tiny premises. Among them were two young women who were commercial artists. One day they complained that there was nothing in the store to sit on, and after I had stumbled for excuses, they presented me with a bench decorated on either side with the inscriptions: “Words and Music by Stuart Brent,” and “Time Is Well Spent with Stuart Brent.” Now I felt sure things were looking up.
My next good genie and an important influence in my life was a short, bald gentleman with horn-rimmed spectacles who stood uncertainly in the doorway and asked, “Where’s the shop?”
He was Ben Kartman, then Associate Editor of Coronet Magazine, a man as kind and thoughtful as he is witty and urbane. He came in and looked around, studied the empty shelves, and shook his head. He shook his head often that afternoon. He wondered if I was seriously trying to be a bookseller—or was I just a dreamer with a hideout?
Surely I wanted to survive, didn’t I? Surely I wanted to sell books. Well, in that case, he assured me, I was going about it all wrong. For one thing, I had no sign. For another, I had no books in the windows. And most important of all, I had no stock. How can you do business without inventory? You can’t sell apples out of an empty barrel.
I took all his comments without a sound.
Then Ben said, “Sunday come out to the house. I’ve got a lot of review copies as well as old but saleable books. Even if you don’t sell them, put them on the shelves. The store will look more prosperous.”
He gave me several hundred books from his library, which we hauled to the store in his car. The Seven Stairs began to look like a real bookshop.
Ben Kartman also decided that I needed publicity. Not long afterward, my name appeared in a daily gossip column in one of the Chicago newspapers. Ben said that these daily puffers could be important to me, and this proved to be the case.
Meshing with my association with Kartman was another significant influence—a man who certainly altered my life and might have changed it still more had he lived. He was Ric Riccardo, owner of a famous restaurant a quarter of a mile down the street from my shop, and one of the most extraordinary and magnetic personalities I have ever encountered. He was an accomplished artist, but it was his fire, his avid love of life, his utterly unfettered speech and manner, his infatuation both with physical being and ideas that drew the famous and the somewhat famous and the plain hangers-on constantly to his presence. He is the only great romantic character I have known.
He first came into my store one day before Christmas. He wore a Cossack fur hat and a coat with a huge mink collar and held a pair of Great Danes on a leash. He had the physique of Ezio Pinza and the profile (not to mention more than a hint of the bags beneath the eyes) of his friend, the late John Barrymore. He was tremendous. He told me all he wanted was some light reading to get his mind off his troubles.
Later when Riccardo and the Danes entered the shop, virtually filling it, I would stand on a chair to converse with him. He was very tall and it gave me a better chance to observe him. Although his language was often coarse, he shunned small talk or fake expressions. The only time he ever reprimanded me was the day I used the phrase, “I’ve got news for you.” As our friendship became firm, I would often join him after closing the store for a bowl of green noodles (still a great specialty of the restaurant which is now managed by his son).
Now if, as Ben said, I did everything wrong, there was at least one thing I certainly did not neglect to do. I talked to people. I knew my books and I knew what I was talking about. Ideas were and are living things to me and objects of total enthusiasm. It hurt me terribly if someone came in and asked for a book without letting me talk with him about it. The whole joy of selling a book was in talking about the ideas in it. It was a matter of sharing my life and my thought and my very blood stream with others. That was why I had been impelled into this mad venture—unrelated to any practical consideration beyond enthusiasm for the only things that seemed to me to be meaningful. Ric was one of those who responded to this enthusiasm.
One very cold February morning, a cab stopped outside the shop. I saw two men and a woman get out and come up the stairs. There was a good fire going in the fireplace and it was quiet and warm inside.
Ric was the only member of the trio I recognized, although the other man looked at me as though I should know him. But the woman! She wore the longest, most magnificent mink coat I had ever seen, the collar partially turned up about her head. When she spoke, I backed away, but she stepped in and extended her hand to me. It was Katharine Hepburn.
“Oh, yes, that’s Katie,” the unidentified man said, and all of them laughed at my obvious confusion. Miss Hepburn sat on my decorated bench and held out her hands to the fire.
Ric said, “Stuart, my boy, this is Luther Adler.”
I was too nervous to say anything as we shook hands. I could only keep staring at Katharine Hepburn. I adored her. I loved her accent and those cheek bones and that highly charged voice. I wanted so much to do something for her but I couldn’t think of anything to do.
Suddenly Ric said, “Let’s buy some books.”
Mr. Adler looked about and said, “Do you have a book for a Lost Woman?”
I said, “Yes,” and handed him a copy of Ferdinand Lundberg’s new book, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex. He gave it to Miss Hepburn, saying, “Here, Katie, this is for you.”
Without a pause, she turned and said, “Do you have a good book for a Lost Jew?”
“Yes,” I said, and produced a Sholem Asch volume.
She gave it to Mr. Adler, saying, “Here, Luther, this is for you.”
They bought many books that morning, and I was swept away in wonder and exhilaration at the possibility of bringing happiness to Lost Women, Lost Jews, the Beautiful and the Great, alike in their needs with all of us for the strength and joy of the spirit. It was wonderful—but it was awful when I had to take their money.
A world very much like that of my dreams began to open up. People came. Authors began to congregate around the fireplace. The shop was visited by newspaper writers like Martha King, of the Chicago Sun-Times, who wrote a charming article, for which I was deeply grateful. I was beginning to do business, although still without a cash register. The rent was paid promptly, and McClurg’s permitted me to have a charge account. One or two Eastern publishers even let me have some books on open account. And the man from Columbia Records kept dropping by, leading me to believe that they might be thinking about me in spite of their presumed obligations to Lyon and Healy.
Why did people come, often far out of their way and at considerable inconvenience? I was too busy to reflect upon the matter at the time. There was nothing there but the books and me—and a great deal of talk. But some need must have been filled—by moving people to take notice of themselves, forcing them to think about what they were reading or what they were listening to. We talked a lot of small talk, too, but it was small talk with heart in it. And the effect was contagious. Those who came told others and they came too.
The place acquired a life of its own, which will be the subject of many of the following pages. But that life, real and wonderful as it was, could not endure. Perhaps it is worth writing about because it is not a success story—and what came after has its meaning in the reflected tenderness and flickering hope those years taught one to cherish.
This is not merely a sentimental record. It has no point unless seen against the background of the cultural poverty of our society—and the apparent economic impossibility of alleviating that poverty through commercial channels such as the publication and distribution of books.
The plain fact is, the kind of business I wanted to immerse myself in does not exist. One of the reasons it does not exist is because the publishing industry does not—and quite possibly cannot—support it, even to the extent of supplying its reason for being: good books. The business of publishing and the profession of letters have become worlds apart. The arts are being bereft of their purpose through a horrifying operation known as “the communications industry,” an industry geared for junk eaters.
Publishing is “bigger” and more profitable today than ever before, largely because of the mushrooming of educational institutions and the consequent demand for textbooks. Wall Street has gone into publishing; there is money in it. But the money is in mass distribution—through the schools, through the book clubs. It is little wonder that the individual, personal bookseller is an anachronism, lost sight of by the publishers themselves. The bookseller may feel outraged, as I did, when a publisher sells him books, then sends out a mailing piece to the bookseller’s customers offering the same books at a much lower price. The practice is certainly unfair, but the bookseller has become a completely vestigial distributing organ. What the publisher is really looking forward to is the possibility that one of the book clubs will take some of his publications, further slashing the price beyond the possibility of retail competition.
And what of the writer? If he can turn out bestsellers, he can live like a potentate. But the sure-fire formula in this field is to pander to a sex-starved culture and a dirty, vulgar one to boot. A book written by this or any other formula can’t be worth anything. A true book must be part of the individual’s life and spirit.
It is commonplace to blame the public for what the public gets. And no doubt the public must take the blame. But I am not interested in giving the public what it wants if this means corrupting man’s spirit even through as ineffectual a medium as the printed word.
As a matter of fact, I have never had what people wanted to read (“Your competitor just bought fifty copies of this title,” the publisher’s representative would tell me, shaking his head hopelessly), and I lost out because of it. But my personal satisfaction derived from recommending some book, possibly an old one, that I thought would bring the reader something fresh and real.
Anything that touches the heart or stirs the mind has become a matter for apology. I think of Mary Martin coming out on the stage in South Pacific and begging the audience’s indulgence and forgiveness for having to admit to them that she was in love with a wonderful guy!
Is it any wonder that modern men and women are so threatened, frightened, and weak when they have lost the capacity for love, tenderness and awe—capacities which should be nourished by what we read? And especially the men. “Where are the men?” the women ask. Once a man has joined “the organization,” the love of a real woman offers a basic threat. The organization man doesn’t want to be challenged by a relationship any more than by an idea.
It was to these deficiencies in people’s lives that I had hoped to minister. Reading remains a positive leverage to keep us from becoming dehumanized. But easy reading won’t do it, or phony Great Book courses that foster smugness and an assumed superiority (read the ads purveying this kind of intellectual snobbery).
We can’t go on devaluating the human spirit and expect some miracle to save us. Even Moses couldn’t get the Red Sea to divide until a stranger acted upon absolute faith and jumped in. I felt my job was to get people to jump—to read something, old or new, that could engage them in some real vision of human possibilities: to read Albert Camus or Graham Greene or Rollo May or Erich Fromm. To read again (or for the first time) Ibsen’s Peer Gynt or Kafka’s The Trial, Bruno Bettleheim’s The Informed Heart, F. S. C. Northrop’s Philosophical Anthropology, or Father duChardin’s The Phenomena of Man.
I decided I could sell a good book just as easily as a bad book. In the days following the visit of Katharine Hepburn, I placed Modern Woman: The Lost Sex into the hands of many women, and the responses were gratifying and illuminating. Finally I wrote a letter to Ferdinand Lundberg, co-author of the book, telling him of one of the most interesting of these incidents. He sent the letter along to Mary Griffiths, then advertising manager for Harper and Brothers, who asked permission to reprint it in its entirety as an ad in the Chicago Tribune book section. A phenomenal sale resulted. I sold hundreds of copies and so did other Chicago booksellers.
It looked as though things were opening up for me, as though I might be on the way toward proving my point. And perhaps something was proved. Much later when in a state of great depression I wrote a gloomy letter to Hardwick Moseley, sales manager of Houghton Mifflin, he responded by saying, “Never will I permit you to leave the book business. If we had fifty more like you in the United States we might have a business!” But for so many reasons, some of which I have just dwelt on, the odds against fifty such enterprises flowering—or any of them flourishing—are very, very great.
Meantime, however, several colorful years of the Seven Stairs lay ahead, and, beyond that, an unimagined range of encounter in the diverse realms of art and letters, psychiatry, commerce, and, that monster of the age, television.