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WISE MEN FISH HERE--THE STORY OF FRANCES STELOFF AND THE GOTHAM BOOK MART
First edition. Jacket chipped. A fine bookselling biography. Jacket chipped with some spotting. Loosely inserted are four related articles about Steloff. x, 246 pages. cloth, dust jacket.. 8vo..
268 pages, Paperback
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June 17, 2008Though not the best-written book, this is worth it for the story it tells.
In 1920, Frances Steloff founded the Gotham Book Mart, and, although she sold it in 1967, remained actively involved in it until her death in 1989 at the age of 101.
GBM was more than just a bookstore. It was a gathering place and a nurturing place for writers. Steloff was a great supporter of those "little magazines" that are the beginnings of so many literary careers, where so many poets and short story writers find their first works published.
She was a defender of books against censorship, and was taken to court on more than one occasion on the charge of selling "obscene" literature. She was vindicated each time.
Steloff was an early promoter of books through author readings and parties, held in the garden at GBM's first location. She was a founding member of the James Joyce Society.
Yet, oddly enough, Steloff was not much of a reader herself. Says her biographer, "Maybe the truth is that she likes books more than she likes to read books. She is related to the water diviner who by some mysterious and inimitable process divines for the benefit of friends and patrons infinitely more water than he himself has any use for." What she did have was the instinctive ability to recognize literary genius, and to introduce good people who liked books to the company of those who created them.
Shortly after her 100th birthday, The New Yorker published a piece in "Talk of the Town", which began: "The shelf life of a book at the Gotham Book Mart, the most celebrated bookshop in New York, appears to be however long it takes for the person who is next destined to read the book to arrive at the shop and discover that it's there. That books have destinies as objects, and people appointments with them, is a fundamental principle of life at the Gotham". No nonsense about "bestsellers" here!
In 1920, Frances Steloff founded the Gotham Book Mart, and, although she sold it in 1967, remained actively involved in it until her death in 1989 at the age of 101.
GBM was more than just a bookstore. It was a gathering place and a nurturing place for writers. Steloff was a great supporter of those "little magazines" that are the beginnings of so many literary careers, where so many poets and short story writers find their first works published.
She was a defender of books against censorship, and was taken to court on more than one occasion on the charge of selling "obscene" literature. She was vindicated each time.
Steloff was an early promoter of books through author readings and parties, held in the garden at GBM's first location. She was a founding member of the James Joyce Society.
Yet, oddly enough, Steloff was not much of a reader herself. Says her biographer, "Maybe the truth is that she likes books more than she likes to read books. She is related to the water diviner who by some mysterious and inimitable process divines for the benefit of friends and patrons infinitely more water than he himself has any use for." What she did have was the instinctive ability to recognize literary genius, and to introduce good people who liked books to the company of those who created them.
Shortly after her 100th birthday, The New Yorker published a piece in "Talk of the Town", which began: "The shelf life of a book at the Gotham Book Mart, the most celebrated bookshop in New York, appears to be however long it takes for the person who is next destined to read the book to arrive at the shop and discover that it's there. That books have destinies as objects, and people appointments with them, is a fundamental principle of life at the Gotham". No nonsense about "bestsellers" here!
April 20, 2023
On February 2, 1964, in my early 20s and living in New York City, I attended a poetry symposium at the Young Men’s Hebrew Association Poetry Center featuring Gregory Corso, Jack Gilbert, John Simon and Theodore Weiss. I was knocked over by Jack Gilbert and after the symposium purchased my first copy (the paperback) of his VISIONS OF JEOPARDY from a rather grandmotherly woman who had set up a table of books in the lobby. This was Francis Steloff, the legendary proprietor of the Gotham Book Mart. I later visited her store and purchased some other books, and she calculated my bill with paper and pencil. When I asked her a question, she snapped at me: “Don’t bother me with questions when I’m adding!”
W. G. Rogers 1965 WISE MEN FISH HERE tells the fascinating story of plucky, persistent Steloff and her bookshop. (“Wise Men Fish Here” was the legend on the metal sign that hung over the entrance to the store.) Rogers was by no means a fortunate choice as a biographer, but that ultimately doesn’t matter: the richness of the material enlivens the book all the way through, no matter how muddled Rogers’ prose gets. (Warning: you do have to get past sentences such as this: “Bigots find abhorrent atheistic or pagan doctrines expounded.”)
After clerking in a number of different New York bookstores, Steloff opened her own shop (then on west 45th) in 1919 with a stock of fewer than 200 books. Having coming through an impoverished childhood, in which she was pulled from school after third grade to go to work selling flowers from a tray, Steloff became a lifelong penny-pincher. Rogers recounts how she would cut the bottoms off correspondence, right below the signature, and tuck the blank pieces into a box to use as notepaper in running the bookstore. She also collected brown twine from mail carriers from their bundles. “You can’t buy it. And look how good it is.”
Of her short, practical, unfashionable hairdo, Steloff said: “I had to go to the beauty parlor and have it cut regularly. Every time I swore I’d never go again. I could never be a slave to a beauty parlor. They always do something wrong, too. They make you look like everybody else. If people were born that way, say with balloon hair, they’d hate it. But they think it’s smart to buy it.”
She became a champion of young poets and other fledgling writers, displaying and promoting their works and often providing them with financial and other support. She was one of the earliest proponents of the “little magazines” that gave so many now classic writers their start. Rogers notes that the stories that eventually became the book WINESBURG, OHIO, published individually in various littles, netted author Sherwood Anderson a total of $85.00.
Here’s a memorable note Steloff received from Henry Miller in 1940: “Many thanks for the check which came in handy — and also for the wearing apparel, which I also prize. Just my size. Always happy to get cast-off clothes. Honestly. I’ve walked around in other people’s things nearly all my life — I fit into almost any sized outfit — sounds incredible but it’s so.”
In 1947, James Laughlin, the owner of the indispensable publishing house New Directions, published SPEARHEADS: 10 YEARS’ EXPERIMENTAL WRITING IN AMERICA. The dedication read: “The Publisher takes the liberty of dedicating this volume to Frances Steloff, most confident that its contributors will applaud his choice, because no one has done more than she to further the cause of good books by non-dead writers for whom writing is a thing to live for.”
Ironically, Steloff, who was somewhat of a prude, ended up having to defend herself against chargers of obscenity and immorality during the mid-century censorship fervor that seems to be disturbingly back among us today. When she won her defense, she was “quick to note that the official paper given to her clearing her of the charge was, just like her accused books, illustrated. The gold seal on it showed a buxom nude woman, Over a century old, the seal dates back to the original court of oyer and terminer. The woman represents Justice searching out Truth … The woman was a nuder nude, Frances Steloff maintained, than any and all the figures for which she was brought into court.”
Once when Steloff had a lot of overdue accounts and trouble paying her own bills, Christopher Morley penned five stanzas of spirited doggerel for her (too long to quote here) under the title “The Rubaiyat of Account Overdue.” “Naturally she was delighted and printed it in two formats: a single page to accompany the bills, promising as a reward for prompt payment a deluxe autographed copy. That brought excellent results, but an additional problem: customers who had (already paid) felt cheated.”
Oddly enough, in spite of her insatiable interest in books and their creators, Steloff wasn’t much of a reader. This was also true of Sylvia Beach, the proprietor of the famed Shakespeare and Company in Paris.
After I left New York in the mid 1960s and resettled for a time in my native Springfield, Illinois, with its limited bookstores, I often ordered select titles from the Gotham and its periodic catalog, “We Moderns.” Packages were instantly recognizable as coming from there because they were invariably wrapped in the Gotham’s trademark blue butcher paper.
Anais Nin must have been in the store on the day my order for the first volume of her diary arrived, because when I got the package and opened the book, there on the front flyleaf was Nin’s impeccable signature with an inscription: “For David Curry — more to come — Anais Nin.” Imagine my 24-year-old self’s delight. That may have been the day I became hooked as a book collector.
Rogers’ book features eight pages of period photographs from Steloff’s life and the life of her store, including readings and parties with literary and artistic luminaries of the time.
W. G. Rogers 1965 WISE MEN FISH HERE tells the fascinating story of plucky, persistent Steloff and her bookshop. (“Wise Men Fish Here” was the legend on the metal sign that hung over the entrance to the store.) Rogers was by no means a fortunate choice as a biographer, but that ultimately doesn’t matter: the richness of the material enlivens the book all the way through, no matter how muddled Rogers’ prose gets. (Warning: you do have to get past sentences such as this: “Bigots find abhorrent atheistic or pagan doctrines expounded.”)
After clerking in a number of different New York bookstores, Steloff opened her own shop (then on west 45th) in 1919 with a stock of fewer than 200 books. Having coming through an impoverished childhood, in which she was pulled from school after third grade to go to work selling flowers from a tray, Steloff became a lifelong penny-pincher. Rogers recounts how she would cut the bottoms off correspondence, right below the signature, and tuck the blank pieces into a box to use as notepaper in running the bookstore. She also collected brown twine from mail carriers from their bundles. “You can’t buy it. And look how good it is.”
Of her short, practical, unfashionable hairdo, Steloff said: “I had to go to the beauty parlor and have it cut regularly. Every time I swore I’d never go again. I could never be a slave to a beauty parlor. They always do something wrong, too. They make you look like everybody else. If people were born that way, say with balloon hair, they’d hate it. But they think it’s smart to buy it.”
She became a champion of young poets and other fledgling writers, displaying and promoting their works and often providing them with financial and other support. She was one of the earliest proponents of the “little magazines” that gave so many now classic writers their start. Rogers notes that the stories that eventually became the book WINESBURG, OHIO, published individually in various littles, netted author Sherwood Anderson a total of $85.00.
Here’s a memorable note Steloff received from Henry Miller in 1940: “Many thanks for the check which came in handy — and also for the wearing apparel, which I also prize. Just my size. Always happy to get cast-off clothes. Honestly. I’ve walked around in other people’s things nearly all my life — I fit into almost any sized outfit — sounds incredible but it’s so.”
In 1947, James Laughlin, the owner of the indispensable publishing house New Directions, published SPEARHEADS: 10 YEARS’ EXPERIMENTAL WRITING IN AMERICA. The dedication read: “The Publisher takes the liberty of dedicating this volume to Frances Steloff, most confident that its contributors will applaud his choice, because no one has done more than she to further the cause of good books by non-dead writers for whom writing is a thing to live for.”
Ironically, Steloff, who was somewhat of a prude, ended up having to defend herself against chargers of obscenity and immorality during the mid-century censorship fervor that seems to be disturbingly back among us today. When she won her defense, she was “quick to note that the official paper given to her clearing her of the charge was, just like her accused books, illustrated. The gold seal on it showed a buxom nude woman, Over a century old, the seal dates back to the original court of oyer and terminer. The woman represents Justice searching out Truth … The woman was a nuder nude, Frances Steloff maintained, than any and all the figures for which she was brought into court.”
Once when Steloff had a lot of overdue accounts and trouble paying her own bills, Christopher Morley penned five stanzas of spirited doggerel for her (too long to quote here) under the title “The Rubaiyat of Account Overdue.” “Naturally she was delighted and printed it in two formats: a single page to accompany the bills, promising as a reward for prompt payment a deluxe autographed copy. That brought excellent results, but an additional problem: customers who had (already paid) felt cheated.”
Oddly enough, in spite of her insatiable interest in books and their creators, Steloff wasn’t much of a reader. This was also true of Sylvia Beach, the proprietor of the famed Shakespeare and Company in Paris.
After I left New York in the mid 1960s and resettled for a time in my native Springfield, Illinois, with its limited bookstores, I often ordered select titles from the Gotham and its periodic catalog, “We Moderns.” Packages were instantly recognizable as coming from there because they were invariably wrapped in the Gotham’s trademark blue butcher paper.
Anais Nin must have been in the store on the day my order for the first volume of her diary arrived, because when I got the package and opened the book, there on the front flyleaf was Nin’s impeccable signature with an inscription: “For David Curry — more to come — Anais Nin.” Imagine my 24-year-old self’s delight. That may have been the day I became hooked as a book collector.
Rogers’ book features eight pages of period photographs from Steloff’s life and the life of her store, including readings and parties with literary and artistic luminaries of the time.
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