Alex Keto Beat Me To It

Our Texas friend Travis “Hey I’m 35 now, maybe I’ll run for President” Erwin (see comment section on Alex Keto's Blog in response to the blog post: Why No One Running for President Represents Change ) has a new Monday series over at One Word, One Rung, One Day called My Town Monday. Travis has invited his many pals to give him a blog post link about their hometowns or any old place they feel like describing.

As the Queen of New York City, I offered to post my valuable insights on my beloved City for this week's Monday gabfest. Lo and Behold, citizen of the world Alex Keto beat me to it. When you are roaming around his blog, after you finish his entertaining and accurate look at the Island of Manhattan, 2008, take a peek at his blog on life in West Berlin. Yep, before they took down the Wall.

Never fear, I will just take a huge jump back in time and describe the Manhattan I really miss. I was born and raised in the Bronx, the only borough of New York City that is actually on the mainland of the United States of America. (I love throwing that into conversations, particularly with Manhattanites.) But in the good old days (please excuse my children while they roll their eyes) the entire City of New York was an adventuresome playground for kids from all five boroughs.

We ran free around the city, in the same way farm kids ran free around the farm. All we needed was fifteen cents for a subway ride, or the courage to sneak under the turnstile, (praise and thanksgiving for the statute of limitations) and we were off on any number of adventures. Before I drown us all in reminiscence, let me focus on one of my favorite places.

Just below Union Square, the center of book buying in New York City was a strip of used bookshops that lined Fourth Avenue and was know colloquially as Book Row. Many of the shops specialized: cookbooks, social science books, one kind of fiction or another. Most of the shop owners wouldn’t allow us in the store without adult supervision for fear that we were street urchins (true) who did not have a real respect for books. (Not true.) Sometimes we could get a bookseller to trust us if we asked the right questions. “Do you have any Nancy Drew books with the old blue covers?” or “Do you have any books of stories or poems that Edgar Allen Poe wrote when he lived in New York?” Then he (or she) would guide us through the store, chiding us not to touch anything. One or two owners (it was always the owners) gave us rags or tissues and cautioned us to wipe our hands before we were more than a foot or two inside the threshold.

Marvin Mondlin, estate book buyer at the Strand Bookstore (the only remnant of the Book Row of long ago) and Roy Meador, a collector have co-authored a book about the used bookstores along Fourth Avenue and the culture of book buying in the City. It's called Book Row: An Anecdotal and Pictorial History of the Antiquarian Book Trade

Times change. Now when I walk into a major chain bookstore, with all their neat shelves and computerized indexes, not to mention their coffee shops, I hear the ghosts of Book Row: “You kids, watch the piles. Don’t knock the books down.” “You want the edition from before the war or the one that came out in 1947?” (This from memory, no punching in numbers and looking up.) “Don’t bring that soda bottle in here; you could spill." "Get out. Get out, you lousy kids.”

They don’t make ‘em like that any more.

Terrie