I thought that today I'd give you something deeper to think about - the place that the independent bookstore might play in contemporary society. What's below is from the introduction to my dissertation, and it's a consideration of what bookstores, especially bookstores since the beginning of the nineteenth century, have meant to the people who visit them and the communities they serve.
The study of bookselling in the twentieth century raises the issue of the differing functions of the freestanding bookshop and the book departments of department stores, which began with the opening of the first modern department stores, and which initiated a discussion of what would become of the independent bookseller by 1920 (discussion of the plight of the independent bookseller continues to this day). Evidence of this in the practice of bookselling in Los Angeles ties the book culture of the city to bookselling and printing practices in the rest of the country, thus adding to the body of knowledge that constitutes American book – and cultural -- history.
A 1930 article by Robert Ulric Godsoe, of the Doubleday, Doran bookshops in New York, bemoaned the loss of the “intimate” bookshop (the bookshop as salon) and indicated that a shop necessarily derived its personality from the person behind the counter. The particular issues presented by Jake Zeitlin and his circle -- my theory here is that Zeitlin and a very few other booksellers created an environment that served in some way as a counterbalance to the particular type of modernist influence offered by the film industry that had established itself in Hollywood and, at the same time, to that of the voluntaristic Protestant middlebrow culture that caused Los Angeles to be called the last great Midwestern or English-speaking city -- with regard to the practice of bookselling concern how a bookstore could be a salon and the bookseller its host, and what this meant to the urban culture in which the salon operated. Such a concept has not been unfamiliar to the practitioners of print culture, although it seems to have lost currency in the current discourse concerning the nature of a “salon.”
The cultural history of the United States provides several precedents for examining the bookshop as a gathering place for intellectual activity. It is difficult not to look at Benjamin Franklin as a salonist bookseller, whose clientele included young craftsmen with aspirations to rise, some of whom contributed to the book culture of Philadelphia by becoming printers. The transcendentalist, teacher, abolitionist, educational reformer and writer Elizabeth Peabody’s bookstore in Boston acted as a gathering place for like-minded women. Also in Boston, The Old Corner Book Store, an adjunct of the publishing house Ticknor and Fields, became a salon for both the publisher’s writers and those of Little & Brown nearby; these writers included Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Ward Beecher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the historians William H. Prescott and George Bancroft.
Writers from out of town, actors and singers also frequented the Old Corner Book Store.
The bookstores of New York City, Philadelphia, and Chicago as well have been gathering places for intellectuals since the beginning of the nineteenth century. Wiley’s bookstore in Manhattan attracted John Fenimore Cooper, Samuel F.B. Morse and William Cullen Bryant as frequent visitors, and George Palmer Putnam, the founder of the publishing house that bears his name, declared G. & C. Carvill, also in New York City, “the lounging place of the literati” in 1833. The celebrated bookseller A.S.W. Rosenbach (pictured here),
a descendent of a pre-Revolutionary Jewish family, wrote that his uncle Moses Polock’s publishing house and book shop in Philadelphia became a meeting place for writers such as Cooper, Bryant, Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville, and he went on to explain that the shop also became a gathering place for book collectors and impecunious book lovers as well.
Adolph Kroch, who started his bookstore in a small space on Monroe Street, writes about how Kroch’s became the “meeting place of intellectual Chicago" during the 1920s, when literary critics and young authors met at the store daily. Brentano’s, a celebrated bookstore in New York, became a rendezvous for famous personalities, including General Grant, during the 1880s. Browne’s Book Store in Chicago and the Boni brothers’ bookshop in New York served similar functions during the first years of the twentieth century, and Madeleine Stern, an expert on the history of bookselling, provides similar examples in Chicago (McClurg’s), San Francisco, and Charleston, South Carolina. As Frederic Melcher, editor of Publishers’ Weekly, wrote in 1925,
a bookseller, competent in his field, takes a place among a city’s influential people and is acceptable as such.
It has been suggested that the social circle that developed around Zeitlin’s bookstores occupied a niche within the culture of Los Angeles similar to that occupied by an even earlier model, the coffeehouses of eighteenth-century London. These coffeehouses served as “clubs” for aspiring young writers. They became centers for book auctions and other kinds of bookselling almost as soon as the mass distribution of books became possible in the seventeenth century. I am increasingly convinced that Los Angeles had even more in common with fin-de siècle Vienna where the writers’ coffeehouses (these kaffeehausen attracted patrons segmented by heritage and occupation) provided their habitués with the social functions through which the needs of a city-dweller could be met and even had an official newspaper, the Vienna Diorum. In late 1929, the Zeitlin circle took on more characteristics of both the London and Viennese coffeehouses when many of the people associated with Zeitlin’s social circle put together a literary magazine, Opinion. Zeitlin concluded that, although Opinion “blasted [no] new pathways [nor] created any great convulsions,” it had a touch about it of “the big city that was coming to be,” even though only seven issues were published.
Sylvia Beach and her bookstore and lending library in Paris, Shakespeare and Company, may offer the closest and most celebrated parallel to Zeitlin’s activities, although she was involved with more famous writers in the center of a specific literary movement at a specific cultural moment (Paris, and the expatriate American artistic community, during the 1920s).
Beach saw her bookstore as a gathering place for visitors and friends (in her biographer Noel Riley Fitch’s words, “a literary center that magically attracted artists from all over the world”); although it was a business, it has been noted that Beach was able to “skillfully conceal” the commercial mechanism of her operation from public view. In some ways, Shakespeare and Company was a salon in competition with the one run by Gertrude Stein. Beach wrote that Thornton Wilder “seemed more or less to disappear from the rue de l’Odeon in the direction of the rue Christine [Stein’s home].” Beach viewed her regular clientele as “the family of Shakespeare and Company.” Aside from bookselling, Beach engaged in publishing in a fairly spectacular way (she supervised the first printing of
Ulysses); she noted that by the 1930s the bookshop had become famous. Although Zeitlin never achieved anywhere near this level of recognition (I don't think that this concerned him), the only thing Shakespeare and Company did that his shop didn’t was to serve as the meeting place for an expatriate community.
Although Robert Crunden did not set up a taxonomic classification of the salons or social circles he wrote about in his pioneering work,American Salons: Encounters with European Modernism, it is clear that the salons he described (those "operated" by the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, the socialite Mabel Dodge, and the collectors Walter and Louise Arensberg) functioned in different and very distinct ways. Examination of Zeitlin’s bookstore as a salon in the context of Crunden’s work shows it to be most like the Stieglitz salon, with the bookstore standing in for Stieglitz’s various art galleries (291, the Intimate Gallery and An American Place) particularly insofar as Zeitlin always had a space within his stores where he displayed art. This does not seem to be the way the salons associated with Dodge, a facilitator who collected people for freewheeling discussions, or with the Arensbergs, who were patrons but not publishers, operated. Steiglitz took over the publication of the little magazine Camera Notes and then published a “bigger” magazine, Camera Work, as the manifesto of his Photo-Secession movement, during which time the writers who contributed to the magazine also wrote for other less-focused publications on matters having to do with the larger world of art. He operated the 291 Gallery to demonstrate visually what Camera Work meant about photography and, later, the Intimate Gallery and An American Place during the 1920s to show the work of modern American artists, much as Zeitlin emphasized local artists in the art he displayed.
There are of course major differences between Zeitlin’s business in art and the Stieglitz operation. Zeitlin was not himself a visual artist, but an art dealer. He displayed (and sold) work that might not have come into existence without Stieglitz’s activities (for example, the photographs of Edward Weston). Stieglitz (here, in a photograph by his protege Edward Steichen),
although he sold art, disdained the role of dealer, choosing instead the roles of “active patron, astute collector, and impassioned supporter of the arts.” Zeitlin’s social circle resembled Stieglitz’s operations both in terms of its ability to provide patronage and in the nature of the patronage it provided; several members of the Zeitlin circle provided other members with outlets, sometimes commercial, for their creative output.
On the other hand, as a gathering place, Zeitlin’s bookstores were more like the Arensbergs’ living room. The art historian William Innes Homer has suggested that 291 was an extension of Stieglitz and his thought, while the “less doctrinaire” Walter Arensberg promoted greater freedom of a kind that was more in keeping with the development of Dada in the United States.
Louise and Walter Arensberg, with Marcel Duchamp, 1936.
Zeitlin also showed other members of his circle the advantages of attracting creative people to your business establishment, as the printers Saul Marks and Ward Ritchie have both testified. Zeitlin’s display of art was decidedly commercial. Nevertheless, Zeitlin’s involvement with art raises questions concerning the collaboration between artist and art dealer and about the ways in which institutions connected with a conservative culture assisted in introducing elements of the avant-garde into a specific cultural milieu.
Arensberg raises another problem connected with the specific individuals who are the concern of this study. Arensberg and other members of the Zeitlin circle, particularly the architects and the graphic designers, were connected to European and American avant-garde movements in modernism. Arensberg himself is best known for having operated the salon that brought Dada to New York City immediately after World War I. Other members of the circle which coalesced around Jake Zeitlin's bookstores, however, including Zeitlin, involved themselves in some practices, notably book collecting and fine printing, that are allied with the arts and crafts movements of the late nineteenth century and that might lead a historian to claim that they were antimodernists. To further complicate this, the city in which this activity took place is still known as the home of the motion picture industry, whose product, its syntax and its applications had been established as modernist by 1917 when Los Angeles was acknowledged as its center. Study of the cultural world of Los Angeles during the interwar years inexorably places it within the context of American Modernism. This examination should thus help to determine how the culture produced by Los Angeles outside film related to what else was going on in the rest of the world.
There's a lot more theory concerning the role of the bookstore in several areas, most notably in the area of book production, but I don't think I should burden you with it all at once, especially not first thing in the morning!
5:40 AM: Alas, this is one of the days when I start teaching at 8 AM and end at around 6:45 PM. There ARE breaks, and I'll be able to check in around 9:45 for an hour or so and again after 12:30. It will be like this through mid-December. I'm up now because I'm writing my morning class presentation.