ALAN writes:

More than thirty years ago I worked in an antiquarian bookshop in St. Louis. By no means was it a “respectable” job. But by no means was I a respectable person. Since 1966, I had been an outlier, a dissident, a misfit who wanted no part of the speed and frenzy of modern life.

The bookshop occupied an old building five stories high. There were thousands of books on all floors, but only the first two floors were open to customers. There were hundreds of old magazines, bound journals, phonograph records, sheet music, postcards, comic books, and ephemera.

At one time the building was a Drug House. Or so it said in advertisements for the pharmacists who worked there. In later years, it was occupied by shoe companies and costumers.

The building next door had once been the Loew’s State Theater, a movie palace with carpeted staircases.  In its early years, a parrot and a macaw greeted visitors as they walked into the lobby.  It was aglow with moviegoers and excitement on the night in 1944 when the motion picture “Meet Me in St. Louis” was shown there for the first time anywhere.

The bookshop was the oldest and largest in St. Louis, dating from the 1930s.  An acquaintance once said to me, “I’ve heard good things and bad things about that place.” I said to him:  Both are true. 

It was owned by a Jewish couple named Sam and Janet. Sam was a hard-boiled character, part businessman, part book-hustler, part storyteller. He was also a part of Old Downtown in its glory years.  He was not known for his self-restraint. Several times in the 1950s men attempted to rob him. But he had a permit to carry a gun, so he caught the robbers each time.  It was likely from such episodes that he became as cynical as he sometimes appeared in later years.

But he could also be decent and civil. I talked with him many times from the 1960s to the 1990s.  He may have lacked polish, but he didn’t lack wits. He was the boss and made sure all customers knew it.

Janet was short and plump and invariably courteous to me whenever I walked into their shop as a customer in the 1960s and ‘70s. Only many years later, after she died, did I discover that she and I had had one thing in common: Each of us wrote letters to newspapers. She was a good writer. The bookshop was the subject of an essay she wrote in 1944 for Slant, a small literary magazine in St. Louis.  I have copies of ten letters that she wrote and that appeared in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, the conservative newspaper of the city’s two dailies, in the 1950s about such things as riding on the old streetcars, a day they spent at an amusement park, and the death of a fellow bookseller.

The second floor was one large open space with a high ceiling. Portions were carpeted.  Tall ladders could be moved between ranges of high shelves of books that extended the length and width of the building.  There were two large bay windows at the front of the building where you could stand and look down on Washington Avenue, which was once downtown’s busiest street.

All the classic old histories of St. Louis—Billon, Cox, Hagen, Hyde, Stevens, Compton and Dry—were there.  I handled multiple copies many times, but it was only a matter of days or hours before some collector bought them.

It was a notable discovery to find any section of books organized even half-well. One day I found Joe E. Brown’s 1956 autobiography Laughter is a Wonderful Thing on a shelf of books about mathematics.  That was highly improbable because Mr. Brown was a comic actor, not a mathematician. But it was a fortuitous discovery: I bought the book and gave it to my father, who remembered Joe E. Brown’s comedy films and enjoyed reading it.

For decades I had searched for astronomer Donald Menzel’s book Flying Saucers, published by Harvard University Press in 1953, but I could never find it. Finally, in the 1980s, I found two copies buried in boxes on upper floors. Other notable finds included a stamp album that a young woman had filled with 36 colorful stamps issued by the National Wildlife Federation in 1951.

I came across early printings of the OZ books and the Eleventh Edition Britannica, all buried in boxes.  I cleaned sets of old leather-bound law books or the works of Twain or Dickens and then applied a liquid formula to the leather to enhance its appearance.

I found books for my mother, books about baseball and St. Louis history for my father, the history of an order of Catholic nuns for my aunt, and a history of the St. Louis Archdiocese for a friend.

Many customers had special interests. One man collected old Bibles. Another wanted old books or articles about Joe DiMaggio. Harry, a wrestling fan, came in looking for old wrestling club programs. Another man wanted old books about golf. J. Harlen Bretz’z Caves of Missouri was always in demand, as were books by Gene Stratton-Porter and Albert Payson Terhune.  A guest curator at the Planetarium came in looking for illustrated articles about spaceflight in early 1950s issues of Colliers magazine to use in an exhibit.  I found several for her and she was pleased.

Veteran sportswriter Bob Burnes walked in one day and said he was looking for a copy of his own book. On another day I answered the phone and found myself talking with the daughter of 1940s’ St. Louis Cardinals’ outfielder Terry Moore, who wanted a certain book on Cardinals’ history. When they were in town and stopped in to browse, I met sportswriters Jerome Holtzman from Chicago and Joseph Durso from New York.

I respected Sam because he provided a shop that was the only one of its kind in St. Louis and kept it in business for 70 years, no small achievement. Actors came in to browse when they were in St. Louis to appear in plays. Law firms ordered sets of old law books for their offices. Librarians came in looking for ephemera related to St. Louis history. Booklovers and retired booksellers came in regularly and spent hours browsing. I remember three of them:

— John had worked for a Catholic publishing company in a building a few blocks away.  He was the embodiment of a conservative businessman: Always well-dressed, well-groomed, self-composed, and speaking carefully in a moderate tone. He and I became friends and we talked many times about his fondness for classical music, mystery novels, and old motion pictures, and his memories of Old Downtown from when he was a boy and his mother would take him there on the streetcars.

— Verland was also well-mannered and soft-spoken; a booklover whose particular interest was ancient history. We talked about our mutual fondness for cats, and I would meet him by chance at book fairs and in other bookshops. The last time I saw him, about twenty years ago, was in an old house filled with thousands of books where we talked as we petted Torey, a housecat who was in his last days. And now Verland is gone, Torey is gone, and that house is gone.

— Al had been a bookseller in New York. He leaned toward socialism but was a decent fellow otherwise.  He talked about his days in New York and about the poetry of Edwin Markham and the work of Eugene Debs.  He told me he had visited Emanuel “Manny” Haldeman-Julius at his home in Kansas. (Haldeman-Julius published thousands of the “Little Blue Books” in the 1930s-‘40s.  They could be found in vending machines across the country and sold for a nickel or a dime. I found some of them buried in boxes when working in that bookshop in the 1980s.)

One day Sam’s son and I walked over to the Quiet Corner Restaurant, about two blocks away, and selected a booth. Terry came with us. He worked in the bookshop at that time. He was odd and made no attempt to conceal it. But he was never rude or aggressive. That would have been out of character. He was courteous to customers. He was not an agitator. He was diffident. He was a grown man, younger than us, but short in stature. He worked responsibly and competently when he wanted to, which was not all the time. I got the impression his home life left a lot to be desired.

When talking with Terry one winter, I mentioned that I had been looking for an old LP record of Rosemary Clooney’s 1950s’ hit song “Suzy Snowflake” and offered to pay for a copy if he could find it, which I doubted he could do.  (This was years before the Internet.) But he surprised me and handed me the LP he had found.  It was in poor condition but it did include that song, which I had enjoyed hearing when I was a toddler in the 1950s and now wanted to hear again. So I gave him five dollars for it. He was happy.  So happy that later he gave me a card in which he had written, “Thank you for being my friend.” To me, it was just a simple business transaction. But to him, it was a token of friendship. I got the impression that for Terry, friends were hard to find.

The Quiet Corner Restaurant is long gone, as is Terry.

On some mornings before work, I stopped to buy coffee and donuts in a small shop in a theater building or at another shop in a hotel building. Both shops are long gone.

Linda worked in the bookshop for a while. She was Catholic, very traditionalist-minded, very unhappy about the Modern Church, and very anti-Communist. Like me, she stood far outside the mainstream in daily life. She wrote letters to people like William F. Buckley and the Archbishop of St. Louis, encouraging them to wise up to the continuing Communist makeover of the Catholic Church. Of course they ignored her, but she was right.  I fell out of contact with her about twenty years ago.

After Sam retired and then died, his son closed the shop for good in 2003, likely because the building’s owners raised the rent. It was the end of an era and one of the final nails in the coffin of Old Downtown. By contrast, what followed was a trendy New Downtown that is an embarrassment for decent people and a haven for freaks and lawbreakers.

Five days ago, thugs exchanged gunshots in the heart of downtown on a street where the Frisco Railroad once had its offices and where in 1966 I walked into S.G. Adams office supply store and waited as a clerk made Thermofax copies for me.  The police couldn’t find the thugs because they were exhausted from picking up bullet casings on the sidewalks.

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