The Bookseller

A few weeks ago, as a friend of mine and I were leaving a restaurant after lunch, we encountered a street vendor sitting behind a table on which he had arranged many large leather-bound volumes, some of them in sets, and a pile of vintage Life magazines. It was another miserably hot and humid day in a summer of hot days, and my friend called out to the vendor, "You need air conditioning out here!" The bookseller laughed, revealing several missing teeth at the front of his mouth.

My friend had uttered his pleasantry without breaking his stride, intending to move on, but before we could do so, the bookseller told us that he had bound the volumes on the table himself, in the rare-book dealer's workshop above the restaurant where had just eaten lunch. Das ist ein buch, responded my friend. The bookseller, who recognized Kant as the source, was so delighted that he jumped up and repeated the sentence. A brief conversation in German and Yiddish then ensued between him and my friend (who later told me that the man's accent in both languages was perfect as far as he could tell), before lapsing back into English.

The bookseller stuck out his hand, introduced himself, and told us that the books and magazines on the table belonged to the rare-book dealer above the restaurant and that, after having bound the books, he was selling the lot on commission. He also ran a book bindery, he said, in Sheepshead Bay. His father had been a rare-book dealer, he told us, and he himself had carried on that trade for twenty years in a basement shop on the East Side, until his crazy landlady quadrupled his rent. "Crazy" doesn't do justice to his expletive-laden description of her, but that was the gist of it. He didn't enter the rare-book business right away. No, for some years he had managed a mob-run restaurant around the corner - here I lost his explanation of why he left that occupation - and began dealing in rare books.

The bookseller told us about being prosecuted for violating an order of protection. The prosecutor, who tended to spit when speaking forcibly, kept spitting in the bookseller's face during the trial. The bookseller accused him of battery and told him that if any more spit landed on him, he'd knock him out. After the prosecutor continued his spray, the bookseller lunged at him, hitting him hard, creating a sensation in the courtroom. Was the bookseller dragged away in handcuffs? We didn't ask. For all we knew, he was out on bail. He mentioned a few other physical altercations, actual and threatened, making it clear that he was not a man to be trifled with.

Displaying a mixture of profanity, invective, and erudition, with scarcely a sentence innocent of a four-letter word, he spoke energetically and emphatically, his frame and hands in a perpetual dance as he talked. A thin wiry man of medium height, he was perhaps 60. The lamentable state of his teeth and the fact that he was selling, on the street, the stock of another vendor suggested that his business affairs had not prospered. Was he worried about his future? If so, it was not apparent. He seemed entirely good humored, living in the moment while telling stories from his past.

After about fifteen minutes of spirited talk (mostly by him), we broke away. If I had been by myself, I would have passed him by in silence, which would have been a shame, because I would have missed listening to an extraordinary talker. How many equally colorful characters do I pass by without ever knowing it? As for this one, may he live to 120.