Diary: (2) Donna Seaman, “River of Books”
Diary: (2) Donna Seaman, “River of Books”
My parents, Bronx high-school sweethearts, were ardent readers. My father, who dropped out at age fifteen to work, schooled himself in libraries and on the job …
Intersection of Clark, Diversey, and Broadway in Chicago, undated photograph
Read Part One of this post here!
As I filled my mind with the ancients by night, by day at the Newberry I was part of a methodically organized and tightly run operation in a large corner room with many windows and half-a-dozen workstations. In the bindery, skilled technicians took apart and stitched back together old books made of vellum and parchment. Books printed on acidic paper were dismantled, washed, and reassembled. My job was to stamp, with gold or silver foil, the book’s title, author, and call number on newly constructed book covers and spines. I worked with cloth-covered boards, setting the type by hand. My station held a set of old wooden type cases with little rectangular cubbies for each tiny metal letter. I was spun back in time, minding my ps and qs, reading type backwards and upside-down. I set each letter in the composing stick, with the necessary spacing material, and loaded the form into an old table-top hand press. I placed each cover carefully on the bed, and then set the thin, delicate foil—so easy to crimp or tear—gently on the cloth. It took all my strength and body weight to pull down the lever and stamp the foil into the cloth, to embed the gold and the silver into the embossed shapes the letters created as they bit into the threads. Over and over again I figured out how to best compose the text, over and over I plucked out the metal letters, the slugs. Again and again, I set the form, loaded it into the press, splayed the cardboard cover wrapped in durable plain cloth of blue, gray, green, red, brown, or black. Gently, gently I lifted the foil, every slight movement a gust of wind.
I had to exert pressure but carefully so as not to shift anything. I needed a clean, crisp impression. I would remove the cover, carefully brush off the loose foil, inspect the embossed letters and numbers, set the cover down at the “finished” end of my worktable and take up the next order. I wore a white lab coat with my name embroidered in blue cursive about the chest pocket.
During my training, I brought in paperback books of my own to practice on, binding them with new covers. My favorite is the sage green cover for Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the cover and spine stamped in gold with a beautiful serif font with a now forgotten name. I either chose it for its conspicuously large O’s, or perhaps I used a different font to accentuate them. The book is an old cheap paperback edition of a translation by Rolfe Humphries published by Indiana University Press that I bought used, a book I marveled over, marking passages gently with pencil.
I was barely getting by on my paltry trainee salary. I needed to make more money and I needed to feed my reading habit. I landed a second low-paying, book-anchored job working nights in a small, humble bookstore, the Book Market, located just north of the big triple intersection of Clark, Diversey, and Broadway on the North Side in a neighborhood busy with small restaurants, shops, bars, salons, low-key medical and law offices, and a shabby hotel. I remember it all with great precision; journal entries confirm it. But even with the help of a patient Chicago Public Library reference librarian, I can find no trace of that small enterprise. It was part of a local chain, and the ace librarian did find a Chicago Tribune ad from that time listing three other addresses for the Book Market, including one I remember on Cedar Avenue, and one far west on Diversey Avenue, but nothing on Clark Street.
In spite of this baffling lack of substantiating evidence, that now ghostly bookstore did exist, I swear. It offered a small, tired selection of popular and pulp fiction and lots of self-help. The books on hand that I was enthusiastic about rarely sold, leading to my initiation into the perverse bounty of “returns.” Booksellers get reimbursed for unsold books, but in the “jobber” universe of cheap paperbacks instead of actually returning them we ripped off the covers to send back for credit, tossing the desecrated books in the trash—except for the ones I brought home and devoured. We primarily sold newspapers and magazines, including a discouraging array of smutty publications relegated to the back corner beneath a large, curved mirror.
I was usually the sole night employee; the huddles of furtive boys and men clumped in the porn corner were annoying at best, potentially dangerous at worst. On the rare occasion when a guy actually purchased one of those tawdry treasures, the transaction was awkward, icky, aggressive or, in a moment of precious recognition, funny, yet still uncomfortable and debilitating. Each night at nine o’clock I had to shoo those miscreants out of the store. I locked up, turned off the lights, and retreated to the cramped, messy office in the back where I tallied receipts that never quite balanced, stuffed bills and coins into a zippered sack, and lugged it to the night deposit at a bank a few blocks away, hoping fervently not to be mugged. I then briskly walked the mile or so to my apartment.
Our little store was stocked by the Chas. Levy Circulating Company whose trucks, jammed with bales of newspapers, magazines, and paperbacks, sported the motto: “Readers are leaders.” The company’s origin story is classic Americana. Young Charles Levy (one source says he was fifteen, another twenty) was living in poverty on the city’s West Side in 1893, a member of the struggling immigrant community of Eastern European Jews who fled antisemitic violence. The Levys headed further West than my relatives, who made the shorter trek from Ellis Island to New York City; they settled in Chicago around Maxwell Street. with its long-running outdoor market where students and artists joined other resourceful low-income folks in search of deals. Levy’s life took an abrupt turn toward success when he entered a raffle and won a horse and wagon. He put his prize to good use, delivering newspapers, initially to blacksmiths’ shops and ballparks. His business grew rapidly; he brought his three brothers on board, and with the advent of motorized trucks their distribution expanded in territory and content to include magazines and paperback books. By the time I was slicing plastic bands off bundled copies of Time and Chicago’s own Playboy, the Chas. Levy Co. was on its way to being the largest periodical distributor in the Midwest and among the largest in the U.S.
In the Chicago Tribune obituary for Charles “Chuck’’ Levy, who died at age seventy-three in 1986, Kenan Heise writes, “In 1956, Mayor Richard Daley’s Committee on Obscene and Pornographic Literature tried to get his firm to censor the books and periodicals it distributed. But Mr. Levy said that, while no publication his firm distributed had been declared illegal or immoral by any court or had been refused mailing privileges, his company could not function as a censor.” Hence our inventory of skin magazines. I was then, as I am now, opposed to censorship and in full support of the freedom to read, yet I wasn’t thrilled to be working in what verged on being an adult bookstore. I talked about this with the smart, hip bookstore manager, who was beset with personal woes, including her boyfriend’s ever kinkier requests which she insisted on sharing with me. She decided to speak up and succeeded in convincing the bookstore owners that more porn rags were being mangled and stolen than purchased, so Levy stopped delivering them. She left it to me to order books to refresh the store’s offerings, and soon pulp paperbacks were joined by literary classics and biographies and works in translation and short story collections and books of essays and poetry. The store went out of business soon thereafter. And apparently took every trace of its existence with it.
Mine is but one story of one child who found her way forward with books, who was fortunate to have adults support her need to read. My parents, Bronx high-school sweethearts, were ardent readers. My father, who dropped out at age fifteen to work when his family became unhoused and split up to stay with relatives, schooled himself in libraries and on the job. He became an electrical engineer, working first in aviation and then for IBM. Having a stable home and family meant everything to him. Not only did he work hard to support us, even when he longed for a less regimented career, he also made sure we had fun. My father loved to read biographies and books about history, cosmology, technology, and baseball. He kept reading even as his eyesight deteriorated, switching to a tablet to boost up the font size.
My artist mother was able to graduate from high school. She kept a spotless and welcoming home, cooked and baked with elan, and took community college classes. She had many friends. She loved to talk, shop, party, and travel. She was a tireless organizer and volunteer. And she managed to create many exquisite works of art, getting up hours before the rest of us to work before household demands intruded. Her own mother had been a talented pianist; she even had a band as a teenager in Philadelphia. But after she was betrayed and abandoned by her well-off first husband, my grandfather, she and her young daughter, my mother, were left traumatized in a small Bronx apartment with few comforts, let alone a piano. Determined to redeem their difficult childhoods, my parents made sure their two daughters had what they did not: parents who loved each other, a secure home, books, art, music and dance. Like my father my mother was a steadfast reader; she and I shared a passion for literary novels.
How fortunate I was to be able to read voraciously from a very young age. Reading is thriving. It’s a bedrock ability. I can hardly grasp the fact that we fail to teach this essential skill to so many children. Two-thirds of American students are not able to read at their grade level. The literacy rate in the United States is around seventy-nine percent, with fifty-four percent of adults reading below a sixth-grader’s literacy level. This is unjust, undermining, and mystifying. People who aren’t taught to read well are at a cruel disadvantage. They struggle to secure well-paying jobs. They’re unable to access information that would help them cope with all the challenges they face. They’re denied the bliss and respite of disappearing into a good book. Far too many of us are just getting by in so many ways; not being able to read makes life exponentially more grueling, dangerous, lonely, discouraging, confounding, and muffled. Because reading is a path to freedom, throughout history enslavers and fascists have found ways diabolical and brutal to silence book people: humanitarians, educators, writers, journalists, publishers, librarians, and booksellers. Battles against reading and the teaching and valuing of history and science are the exact opposite of what we need to navigate a volatile world. Being informed can be a matter of life or extinction. Book bans imperil our future.
Countless young people survive trauma, despair, anxiety, loneliness, deprivation, confusion, bullying, self-loathing, and boredom by reading, by finding refuge in a well stocked library, by finding mentors who encourage their quest. People of all backgrounds in all walks of life can attest to this same rescue, this same river-of-books voyage to selfhood. A love of books ensures that one always has something to look forward to. Life is effortful, often draining; reading replenishes and revitalizes. Reading provides a context for one’s feelings and experiences and hones one’s sense of meaning and purpose, right and wrong.
My work gives me a bird’s-eye view of the book world and I can attest that, finally, there are more books than ever by more diverse writers on more subjects. I have boundless admiration for all the adults outside the book world who make time to choose, find, and read books while conducting lives bristling with myriad demands. All of us insiders are deeply reliant on and in debt to readers, to booklovers who recommend books, join book clubs, attend author events, give books as gifts. Readers, I bow to you.
After working her way through a graduate degree as a librarian by day, Donna Seaman got a job as an editorial assistant at Booklist, the book review magazine of the American Library Association in Chicago, and soon began writing freelance book reviews for them. She is today the editor in chief and adult books editor of Booklist. This post is drawn from her memoir, River of Books, to be published next month by Ode Books, distributed by University of Chicago Press.
Incidentally, Michael Robbins considered Rolfe Humphries’ translation of Metamorphoses right here a couple of weeks ago. And speaking of the Bronx, read Ian Frazier on the Bronx as a magnet for immigrants with big plans.
Book Post is a by-subscription book review delivery service, bringing snack-sized book reviews by distinguished and engaging writers direct to our paying subscribers’ in-boxes, as well as free posts like this one from time to time to those who follow us. We aspire to grow a shared reading life in a divided world. Become a paying subscriber to support our work and receive our straight-to-you book posts. Our recent reviews include: Joy Williams on the hidden Russian modernist Andrey Platonov; Michael Robbins on the perils of translating Ovid, Barry Yourgrau on the policiers of Jean-Patrick Machette.
Dragonfly and The Silver Birch, sister bookstores in Decorah, Iowa, are Book Post’s Fall 2024 partner bookstores. We partner with independent booksellers to link to their books, support their work, and bring you news of local book life across the land. We send a free three-month subscription to any reader who spends more than $100 at our partner bookstore during our partnership. To claim your subscription send your receipt to info@bookpostusa.com.
Follow us: Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Notes, Bluesky, Threads @bookpostusa
If you liked this piece, please share and tell us with a “like.”