Eastern Macro-Metro Corridor, Summer 1991. Monthly mid-Atlantic Loop

7/1/91 – Harold Katz’s operation is in a ratty duplex at the end of a street in a not-very-residential neighborhood in South Bronx. Junk heaped up out front and 3rd world types milling about. HUNDREDS of cartons of books. The two I opened were lousy but I propose to get Tony Tufts as a partner and use his barn, making a run every month, pulling the good stuff from the bad.

Then down to Morristown NJ book shop where I bump into Jack Hanrahan. Go to his house and spend $600 to good effect, with the promise of more to come. Then down to Joe’s in Wilmington and spend a wonderful evening talking till 3 am.

Learned from Hanrahan about the Chatham Book Shop. Good stuff cheap, but you gotta be there, as Jack is every morning at feeding time…

This AM to Mort Rosenblatt’s in Wilmington. He’s sitting around endlessly shooting the shit with Hutch. Don’t these guys ever work? Hutch extracts a promise from me to stop at his place and look at his Polar collection which, he assures me, is a good collection. Tom Baldwin bought all the reference books from some old Quaker for $5000. He rattles on, not knowing that I scarfed 25,000 of the Old Quaker’s goods. Hi Doty – a revered member of the Chadds Ford Meeting. Got in there with his lovely widow, Ann Cope.

On to Ann’s to buy her mostly low-end Polar stuff for $1200. Nice visit. Then to Baldwin’s, then to Hutch’s who, true to his word, has some quality stuff, and I drop $770. Then to Sue and Lou’s, who set me up with Ann Cope in the first place. They’d salvaged a few things from the falling down building where Hi had stashed some good stuff, including a first edition Johnson’s Dictionary, early Mitchell’s atlas and about $1000 worth of pamphlets…

Book fair in Topsfield last week. Book fair in Stockbridge next. Get out Maritime List 66 sometime soon

(A week later)

The 5000 good art books Harold claims to have gotten turn out to be shit, of course, and the whole Tufts scheme crashes and burns. Drive back home from the Bronx and have a phone message from Russ Joy. He has a copy of Yachts of the Clyde. I run up to West Newbury to take a look and he shows me a SECOND copy, even nicer than the first. I offer $1500 for the two and he tells me the second copy is not for sale, but sells me copy #1 for $600. He says Lefkowicz has offered him $1000 for copy #2, but that I can have it for a better offer – hoping, obviously, to get us in a bidding war against each other. I call Lefkowicz and tell him what Russ is up to. He buys the second copy for $900 and we go in on the two together. Russ is in this business for reasons other than making a living, and it confuses things for everybody.

Right now I’m in Hillsdale, NY, the only place I could get a room to do the bookfair half and hour east of here in Stockbridge. So the recession may be ending. Looks like a healthy tourist year. The Stockbridge streets were packed with them. Why do they wear such funny clothes? to make sure they don’t confuse their vacation with the rest of their lives? Why do they need to be so ardently on vacation? Can’t they just be people?

7/19/91 First lines of my autobiography thought of while running, “Fame, wealth and power came late to Gibson…”