THE BOOKSTORE BOOK

 

THE BOOKSTORE BOOK: Charles Rammelkamp reviews a memoir in poetry and prose by Ron Kolm

 

The Bookstore Book
Ron Kolm
Pink Trees Press Press, 2023
ISBN: 978-1666402063
98 pages      $15.00


The penultimate poem in Ron Kolm’s memoir (The Bookstore Book is written partly as prose, partly as verse) is called “It takes a pandemic.” It reads:

            to end
            a fifty-year career of working in
            New York City’s independent bookstores
            which included The Strand, East Side Books,
            New Morning, Coliseum Books, St. Mark’s Bookshop,
            and Posman Books which closed on March 16th ,
            due to the virus. The last book I sold there 
            was Camus’ The Plague.

The Bookstore Book is a delightful collection of anecdotes and observations over that half-century career, full of ironic observations – like the one about Camus and the closing of the bookstore – and of meetings with famous writers and artists, encounters with scammers and weirdos. Before Amazon and the internet, bookstores and libraries were the places you went for literature and information. Kolm captures the magic of that era. He’s a true raconteur, telling stories that feel as though you’re sitting with him in a bar or café, regaling you with his reflections and memories.

At the heart of the collection is Kathryn Adisman’s account of an interview with Kolm in 2002 on the closing of Coliseum Books, the independent bookstore at Columbus Circle, the corner of 57th Street and Broadway, where Kolm worked for over twenty years. He also worked at the Strand and East Side Books and the others he lists above. In the interview, Kolm laments the end of an era, independents giving way to the chains and superstores, like the quintessential neighborhood Irish Bar that’s turned into an anonymous Wendy’s.

But the stories he tells make you smile and nod. In “Man in the Grey Flannel Beret,” itself a witty take on the 1955 Gregory Peck film about a man caught in the middle, Kolm shades the truth in a telephone call with Allen Ginsberg when he calls the poet about coming down to the New Morning bookstore to sign copies of his Collected Works.

In a piece titled “Philip Roth,” about a brief encounter with the novelist at Coliseum Books, where best-selling authors often came to promote their books, Kolm hilariously describes his encounter with another Jewish novelist:

The tiny, grizzled Norman Mailer came by the store, escorted by his statuesque wife,
Norris  Church, who walked him  like a  wayward  bulldog up the steep steps  to the
manager’s station, where we had  piled copies of his books to be signed. He grumbled
but signed them anyway. 

In the poem, “Me and Patti Smith,” Kolm recounts working with the well-known musician/writer when she was still a nobody, shelving books at The Strand. When a customer tells her she looks like James Joyce, she thrusts a Caedmon recording of Joyce reading from his works at Kolm, declaring, ‘That’s bullshit!’ The poem ends with sardonic humor:

            I still have the record
            in my collection.

Other celebrity encounters include Jerry Brown in 1992 when he was running for the Democratic nomination for president. Kolm was working at Coliseum Books, as he tells us in the poem “Winning Is Everything!” The book Brown buys? Mein Kampf! Shades of Donald Trump!

Mention of The Donald leads to a fantasy piece titled “My Lunch with the Late Philip Roth” . It describes an incident when Kolm (working at Posman Books at the time) goes to lunch at the Russian Tea Room with the dead author, resurrected just for this lunch. In the imagined conversation Roth declares: “I hate Donald Trump and everything he stands for. That guy has a vocabulary of seventy-seven words…I call the way he speaks ‘Jerkish.’”

Working in a small shop at the corner of West 10th and Bleecker Street, Kolm writes in “Armadillo Bookstore,” he has to get valid ID from the high-powered attorney William Kunstler. In “The Beat Goes On,” he mistakes the Beat poet Gregory Corso for a bum. In “CBGBs” Kolm recalls the time he worked with the punk musician Tom Verlaine at The Strand. In “Classical Music Lover” he has an exchange with Charles Bukowski. All of these vignettes are charming and witty.

Kolm tells tales of encounters the infamous as well as the famous. In “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again)” he was working at East Side Bookstore on St. Mark’s Place, when a customer brings in some books to sell on consignment.

            One afternoon a woman
            came into the store, glared at me,
            then slapped a small stack of books
            on the counter
            and said we had to sell them.

            I picked up a copy.
            It was the SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas,
            who was now staring at me intently.
            I knew she was the person
            who’d shot Andy Warhol
            from watching the news on TV.
            “Um, sure, we’ll try to sell it,”
            I told her nervously
            and gave her a receipt.
            She spun around and left the store.
            I put her books on a rack,
            mentally apologized to Andy Warhol,
            and breathed a sigh of relief.
 

Not all of Ron Kolm’s vignettes and poems involve famous writers. In “Ugly George” it’s a random dude who is notorious for asking women if he can photograph them bare-chested. “Astor Place Station” describes a haphazard encounter with a guy running from the law. In “Yet Another Strange Customer” we meet a weird priest. In “Incident in a NYC Bookstore,” (‘I’m sitting behind the cash register / in East Side bookstore’), a lunatic customer stabs him in the hand.

Full of a kind of nostalgia and plenty of humor, The Bookstore Book is a collection of tales that could only take place in a bookstore, full of a certain New York City vibe that’s instantly recognizable. The Bookstore Book is a delight to read.