Review from Publishers Weekly: Between 1890 and the 1960s, a bustling trade in used and rare books flourished in New York City along Fourth Avenue, between Union Square and Astor Place. Although the stores that once prospered on this little stretch of street have long since closed, the memories of the halcyon days of the bookselling trade in the city still live in the minds of former customers and store employees. Drawing on interviews and on seminal articles published in the early- and mid-20th century, Mondlin (estate buyer at the Strand) and book collector Meador vividly re-create the passion, wonder and adventure of the book trade as it developed along Book Row. The authors paint portraits of the booksellers who established the Row and who secured its reputation among book lovers. There is George D. Smith, the shrewd but gentlemanly book collector who helped Henry E. Huntington build his own library. Called by many "the greatest American bookdealer," Smith provided an example of the persistence and keen insight into the value of books that became the hallmark of the stores on Book Row. The authors also chronicle other dealers such as Eleanor Lowenstein, whose Corner Book Shop specialized in cookbooks; David Kirschenbaum, who developed a stellar collection of Walt Whitman that formed the foundation of the Library of Congress's collection; and Harry Gold, whose Aberdeen Book Company was the first among the antiquarian stores on Book Row to feature paperbacks, in the 1920s. The authors also reminisce about favorite stores, such as Albert F. Goldsmith's At the Sign of the Sparrow, which specialized in theater memorabilia and which very likely provided the setting for mystery writer Carolyn Wells's Murder in the Bookshop. Mondlin and Meador's affectionate paean to the denizens and dealers of Book Row brings to life the glory days of one of New York City's greatest bygone treasures. The Washington Post's Book World review: In the early spring of 1962, less than a year out of college, I arrived in New York to begin what turned out to be a stay of nearly two and a half years. It was a glorious time to be there. Rents were comparatively low, housing was ample, public transit was so good that it was foolish to own a car. All the great jazz clubs were still open, two major-league teams -- the Titans and the Mets -- played at the grand old Polo Grounds, and the age of franchised retailing had not yet begun: There were stores in New York, too many of them to count, that you couldn't find anywhere else. Because my day off was Monday, I could spend it at the Metropolitan Museum (no admission charge or "suggested donation") and have the place all to myself. Or, if I cared to venture farther afield, I could take a subway to Union Square and head for Book Row: "seven concentrated blocks on Fourth Avenue, plus a few side streets stretching west to Fifth Avenue and north to Twenty-third Street." Talk about stores you couldn't find anywhere else! Talk, too, about too many to count. Precisely how many stores there were on Book Row at any one time is now exceedingly difficult to calculate, but in the early '60s -- Book Row's last great period before its precipitous decline -- there probably were three or four dozen. The best known were Schulte's, Biblo and Tannen, Dauber and Pine and the Strand, but there were innumerable others tucked into what Marvin Mondlin and Roy Meador call "cramped, weakly lighted, inadequately heated, seldom air-conditioned spaces." How many millions of books could be found on Book Row can only be guessed at -- three or four million, maybe? -- but there can be no question that it was "America's unofficial capital for secondhand books." Book Row was the literary Alice's Restaurant: You could get anything you wanted. "Any more or less mainstream book of a general nature with broad appeal -- literature, classic, bestseller, scholarly, preachy, self-help, how-to, inspirational, technical, scientific, instructional -- was usually available eventually for those with time and patience enough to roam from store to store," but there were also "countless books from the sweet and saintly to the weird and wicked outside the mainstream's normal channel," say, "witchcraft, brotherly love, Serbo-Croatian history, palmistry, piety in Samoa, the butterfly stroke, vegetarianism, collecting thimbles, sneezing, business trends north of the border, or whatever" -- if you wanted it, sooner or later you'd find it. Indeed, one of the greatest satisfactions Book Row offered was the joy of the chase. You'd decide you wanted such and such a title, and then spend weeks, or months, or years, searching for it. Every store you entered held out the hope that at last it would be there, and when it wasn't your disappointment was tempered by the knowledge that right next door, or maybe a couple of storefronts away, was yet another store holding out the same hope, and then another, and then another. Haskell Gruberger, who ran the Social Science Book Store, divided customers into "hard-core buyers" and "floaters," but as Mort Sahl once asked in another context, wasn't it possible to belong to both groups at the same time? I was a "hard-core buyer" who "came in regularly" searching for specific titles, but though I never "floated down to Fourth Avenue by accident or casual curiosity," my travels through the stores often felt a lot more like floating than searching; I didn't know what I was going to find, but I figured that if I floated long enough I'd sure enough find something, and find it I almost always did: maybe for a dollar or two (a lot of money to me in those days), maybe for a quarter or a dime. Hunting for books on Book Row could be lonely or it could be convivial. Walk into most stores and the proprietor -- in the smaller stores invariably it was the owner, not some hired hand -- might not look up from his own reading to greet you. Or to accost you: Some Book Row storeowners were notable as much for their prickliness as for their expertise. Some might tell you that you couldn't go into one room or another; then, after they'd seen you a few times and decided you were OK, they'd hand you the keys to the kingdom and let you in. Some, if you asked after a particular title, might simply grunt in dismissal, while others might scurry back to the inner depths and come back with exactly the book you wanted. They were a peculiar breed. They might not have acted that way, but they did it for the love of it. As one habitue put it, "the rare book business is a highly agreeable way of making very little money," as was demonstrated by the "privations, recurrent difficulties, erratic income, financial problems and galloping uncertainties" with which they had to contend, yet many hung on for years. Their stores often went under when they retired or died, but some of those stores stayed in business for decades. The authors explain why: "The booksellers were genuine, committed, lifelong book lovers. They derived pleasure from living and working in the presence of books. They magnified that pleasure when they provided other book lovers with the special books they had anxiously and persistently sought. . . . 'I've tried to find this book for years!' when eagerly blurted by a delighted customer was the bookseller's extra dividend for being there and having the book, whether it was on the shelf gathering dust for years or came in yesterday." The authors trace Book Row's origins to George D. Smith, a legendary bookseller who by 1890 "had an operating bookstore at 830 Broadway -- next door, in fact, to the current Strand Book Store, at 828 Broadway." Over the years he was followed by hundreds of others, most of whom followed the same pattern: "The typical Fourth Avenue bookman started in the profession very young, often as a book scout, worked as a bookstore employee, acquired some know-how, and finally found a modest amount of capital to launch a store of his own." The stores they established "were not uncommonly family affairs," usually operated by brothers but sometimes by husbands and wives. The Strand, the only survivor, is run today by Jack Bass and his daughter, Nancy. The Strand has survived and prospered -- it is the most famous and presumably the most successful used bookstore in the country -- for any number of reasons, the essential one being that it "adjusted as necessary through changing times and kept growing." Other stores fell victim to "high rents, or aging proprietors, or too little business," while the Strand turned itself into "a secondhand book business that was routinely selling several million books and grossing over $20 million annually." That it is still there is a blessing for book lovers, but no one who knew Book Row in its glory days can pretend that it is Book Row: "No comparable substitute has developed, no, not even in cyberspace or those overpopulated Internet burbs. Thanks to the broadband interests and proud diversity of the booksellers there, on Book Row there wasn't just a book for every need, mood or taste. Often there was a whole section of applicable books or even an entire bookstore for every taste, mood, need. The variety, independence, and heterogeneity of the dealers and their books made Book Row a haven for reading and collecting diversity where Vive la difference meant three cheers for nonconformity. In their place have come drearily homogenized chain stores, a global electronic whirlpool erratically accessible mainly to persistent onliners with superhuman patience for slogging through vast swamps of World Wide Web distractions, and a wistfully few widely scattered individual bookshop survivors." As that quotation suggests, there are three things to be said about Mondlin and Meador: They know books and bookselling, they have vigorous opinions, and they can't write. They also can't say no: Book Row is far too long, far too crammed with names and titles long since forgotten. But the book is written with as much love as the booksellers of Book Row brought to their trade, and it certainly will bring back happy memories to anyone lucky enough to have prowled Book Row's endless shelves. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.