Louisa Likes Talk

Louisa Stephens and Dan Frank

photo by Christopher Stephens

(all other color photos, except those noted - like this one - taken by L. Scioscia Stephens)


I'm always ready for a good conversation. Most conversations are like bubbles - delightful, then gone. It is the conversation's passage through, leavening our daily lives, rather than the conversation itself that is significant.



Sometimes though, conversations themselves are kept. For instance, I'm going to post an extremely interesting one I had here with Dan Frank on this blog in a couple of days.


Another good way to capture a conversation is at Storycorps. This is a global archive of conversations housed at the Library of Congress. The project was created by David Isay. He has sound booths set up in a couple of cities and two mobile booths that travel throughout the USA collecting recordings of people talking. About anything. The booths are staffed by remarkably empathetic "facilitators" who handle the technology and exude encouragement.


Dan Frank indulged me by chatting with me in a Storycorps booth. Look it up if you're in Washington D.C. Go chat with someone in a Storycorps booth yourself. And come by riverrun for books or conversation.


storycorps.net
storycorps blog

Jan Herman

 

The Something Else Press sales catalogue is fascinating reading.  Double click to enlarge these pages by Jan Herman.

Buying Something Else

Something Else Press printed wonderful books and pamphlets. I just came across the press' last catalogue 1973/74. Jan Herman, sales manager, wrote descriptions of each book. What great descriptions! I wanted to read every single book.
Chris Stephens often ordered books from Something Else Press. One day in 1974 he telephoned to place an order. Jan Herman answered the phone. He sounded down. "Sorry. Can't. We're broke," he told Chris. "We're out of business. Closed down."
Chris was appalled. "But where are the books?" he asked.
"Lawyer has them. Has all our papers. You might be able to get something from the lawyer I suppose. I don't know how he's handling it."
Herman gave Stephens the lawyer's number. Chris called. The lawyer wasn't filling individual orders but he asked if Chris wanted to buy everything. Chris did. The lawyer sent lists of books stored in Vermont and in NYC. They negotiated a price for the entire inventory and papers. The lawyer said Chris would have to send a truck for them but that he'd arrange workers to load the boxes onto the truck.
Chris was very pleased about the books but not about getting them. For one thing, he had a weekly poker game at our apartment, which he hated to cancel. For another Chris didn't relish a lengthy road trip.
I did. I love road trips. I rented a truck and packed the kids into the back of the cab. I brought along my friend from Marvin Cohen's creative writing class, Bruce Hovenstot. It was evening by the time we were finally ready to roll. The poker players had already arrived. I drove out into the night. Bruce quietly criticized my driving the whole way to Vermont.
We were waiting outside a Vermont barn at the appointed hour next morning. The lawyer came with some workers. We didn't get to meet any of those notable authors and poets and artists in person, but we did get to pack thousands of boxes of their work into the U-Haul truck.
I drove back. We unloaded at our loft on 38th Street. Those books took up a lot of room but we had a lot of room. We had the whole top floor, 17th, and around that time we took the 16th too. Chris picked up more Something Else Press books from the NYC distributor. For months we looked through those boxes.
Business files were there too. Chris could see that production costs on some titles exceeded wholesale price. No wonder they were broke.
Chris Stephens himself, and Frank Scioscia too, have often flipped conventional business wisdom. The riverrun proprietors routinely bought high and sold low. But the difference is that those lines rarely crossed.
Something Else Press was publishing remarkable material. It pumped creative energy into our society. Their bankrupcy leaves us all slightly bankrupt. It was a very fine press - a very fine project.

A Conversation With John Zubal - Book Dealer

  John Zubal is in town today. It's always good to see him.

     Zubal has 180,000 books for sale on the internet. That's a lot of books. I think that makes John Zubal Book King of the Internet.

    His books are warehoused in Cleveland, Ohio. He has a big operation there with a large staff processing incoming books and outgoing orders.

     "I work at the warehouse 8 hours every day. Then I bring a box home. I have a computer in front of the television set. I watch TV and research books. One hand's on the keyboard, the other holding a nice glass of red wine."

     In this way Chris and John are alike. Chris also spends evenings at home looking up or listing books on the internet while he half watches sports or movies. The book dealers agreed that it was a good life. "It's hard work," said John. "But it's good work."

     John opened his book business in 1961. He concentrates on scholarly and antiquarian books. Over more than 45 years John, like Chris, has seen major shifts in the way used and antiquarian books are sold. The internet has changed the market.

     The two book dealers discussed business over lunch. They talked about how Amazon could change the price structure of books on American Book Exchange now that ABE belongs to Amazon.

     The book dealers didn't like the glut of unsaleable books, hundreds of a single title, listed for a penny or a dollar. Those mysteries and popular fiction were published in gigantic print runs for a temporary market. "Those books will never sell. People who wanted to read them bought them at the time. If they're new to the author, they'll buy a paperback reprint. Those listings just clog up the system."

      John told a story about visiting ALibris. "Typists were lined up to process books coming along on a sort of conveyer belt."  It's different from the Wise Bookman taking a book off a shelf, and looking through it to determine publishing information and condition.

     Both John Zubal and Chris Stephens have bridged the chasm of change between book dealing old style and book dealing new style. Their operations are successful in part because they've kept the one and added the other.

  These book dealers survived and are optomistic about the future.

Pramoedya Ananta Toer

One afternoon, almost 20 years ago, Chris Stephens was in the William Morrow publishing offices. He was talking with an editor friend. The editor was planning a trip to southeast Asia. Conversation came around to Indonesian author, Pramoedya Ananta Toer.
"He's in Jakarta under house arrest," said the editor. "Carefully guarded. In a comfortable situation now, I understand, but still confined."
Pramoedya's earlier imprisonments had been far from comfortable.
The Indonesian government was allowing the editor to visit Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Stephens had an idea.
"Wouldn't it be great to get some signed copies of his books? They'd be the only ones. "
"You don't understand, Chris. His books are outlawed there. He's imprisoned because of his writing. You don't just stroll through those streets with his books in your arms."
"What about blank sheets? You could bring him blank sheets. He could sign them and then we could tip them into books when you brought them back here."
"That might work," said the editor.
That did work. Chris brought the editor a packet of blank book-sized pages. The editor brought them to Indonesia.
Pramoedya was reluctant to sign blank sheets. He worried that someone might frame a contract or a confession above the signature and he'd be in further trouble. The editor reassured the author. He got the signatures.
Back in the United States, the signed pages were tipped into existing books. Those signed books came with a good story.
A couple of years later, Pramoedya Ananta Toer was finally released from house arrest. He traveled. He went on a North American book-signing tour.

some of Pramoedya Ananta Toer's books that have been translated into English: The Fugitive (CPS's favorite), Corruption, The King The Witch and the Priest, The Earth of Mankind, Child of All Nations, Footsteps, House of Glass, House of Glass, The Girl From the Coast, A Mute's Soliloquy

Prussian Calvary Officer

Going into strangers' houses for books puts Christopher Stephens into the lives of those strangers. Sometimes he brings more than books back to riverrun.

These were small possessions of an old man long gone. His name was August Giehr. He was a Prussian Calvary officer. The picture on the left was taken 90 years ago, in 1919.

Giehr's time worn kit is painfully touching. There, amongst scuffed stays and shirt studs, lie his medals.

What about those medals?

  Born after WWII, raised in the 1960s, I've been indifferent to valor.  Until now.  Giehr's kit gives me a glimpse of a different world where medals are a treasured currency of honor in battle.

left to right:

1914 Iron Cross, 2nd Class - awarded for bravery, far beyond demands of duty. The original 1813 design is on the back with initials FW for Friedrich Wilhelm III, King of Prussia.   

Silver Cross of Merit with Crown bearing the words 'virbus unitas', the name of an Austro Hungarian battleship

Kyffhauferbund medal - WWI veterans' medal

  There's much more about medals on the internet.  Here's a start:

diggerhistory website with pictures of Prussian military medals

a google collection of websites about German medals

a google collection of WWI Allied military medals

Dana Gioia

2 b&w photos - photo credit Christopher P. Stephens 

 Dana Gioia and Frank Scioscia in front of riverrun 1984

     Dana Gioia discovered riverrun shortly after the store opened.  He and Frank Scioscia became fast friends.  They were a generation apart but they shared a way of thinking about books, authors, readers and life.

     Dana's wife, Mary Gioia, and Frank's wife, Mary Scioscia also became close friends.  The two Marys  belonged to the Hastings Literature Club which celebrates its 100th year anniversary this autumn.   The couples saw each other often.

     When they moved to Hastings both Dana and Mary Gioia worked in management at General Foods.  Dana Gioia kept his poetry on low profile, really no-profile, at GF.  In a parallel world to his work there, his poems were being widely published.   The way I remember this story (but have not been able to corroborate) is that Esquire Magazine ran an article, in the early 1980s,  on the most promising young new poets.  Dana Gioia was named as one of the best.

      The poetry-cat was out of the bag.  Some people had trouble reconciling excellence in poetry with his excellence in business but it was disparate talents like these that later made him so exceptional a Chairman at the National Endowment for the Arts.

     He became the Chairman in 2003, when the organization was riven by external controversy and internal confusion.  He was enthusiastic about art for the widest public.  He introduced great programs like memoir and poetry by returning soldiers, the nation-wide reading project - The Big Read,  community Shakespeare, and more.

     Dana Gioia left the National Endowment for the Arts this January.  He stopped and visited riverrun "on his way" to California.

     I wonder what he will do next.  With his many interests, his many talents, I bet it will be another something big.

Some students at Lyceum Kennedy in NYC enjoying The Big Read with Fahrenheit 451

Dana Gioia's poetry collections: Interrogations at Noon,  Gods of Winter,  Daily Horoscope

Gioia's other books:  Disappearing Ink,  Can Poetry Matter?, Barrier of Language

There are many other articles, essays, poems, anthologies, translations and also libretti

Dana Gioia's website

some video clips of Gioia

a very interesting excerpt from a commencement speech given by Gioia and printed in WSJ