WHERE DO I GET THAT by Jay Gertzman

Where Do I Get That: The Book Stores on Desolation Row

by Jay Gertzman

When congressional committees in the 1950s investigated juvenile delinquency or the ways adult men indulged themselves in violence, thievery, prostitution, or drunken carousing, they blamed the popular mass entertainments and the downtown locations or main stems, where people came to enjoy let off steam. Easy scapegoats were the urban newsstand, drug store, cigar store, movie house, back date or “tourist” book store, and the magazines and books displayed there. People who, because young, working class, under-educated, under-employed, “under-privileged,” or sexually “deviant,” were under the eye of the moral entrepreneur. They were thought more likely to be negatively influenced by sensational reading material than “well-adjusted,” white collar, married, home owning Americans. Here’s an image of a Times Square bookstore in 1954:

situated where the heaviest foot traffic would be, at the grinder movie house showing the strippers, on Broadway (actually, just across the street from the taxi dance hall in Kubrick's Killer's Kiss). The perfect place to pick up a Goodis, John D Macdonald, Wade Miller, Benjamin Appel, or Willeford paperback.

Newsstands were the inevitable site of the “paperback revolution. Publishers, following the lead of Robert DeGraff of Pocket Books, had long treated books as magazines. The first purchase was by impulse. After that, readers chose what was similar to whatever had turned them on in the first purchase. The packaging (blurbs, cover, adverts) of Beacon, Newsstand, Chicago Paperback House is high pressure advertising that appeals to a common denominator (I won’t say “lowest”) of motives for reading. By 1950, with a saturated market, the tawdry image with which even firms such as Pocket, New American Library, and Bantam were increasingly being tarred made writers wonder if their books would even be accepted for review by established critics let alone sell well enough to fetch adequate royalties. Pressure from moralists meant pressure on news dealers. They would send whole shipments back if local authorities cited one or two titles. Therefore self-censorship became a chief method of maintaining a symbolic relationship with the moral authorities. Both the publisher-distributor and the moralist, therefore, continued to identify sex with shame and guilt, and violence (as well as prurience) with the larger category of indecency. Minor adjustments having been made, the sensationalism continues.

So did the symbiotic relationship between publisher and moralist. Complaints by moralists and adjustments by erotica producers kept these apparent adversaries in business. The morphing of the 50s erotic story into the "adult" soft core sex novel of the 60s is an example.

Times Square, and especially Forty-Second Street with its movie marquees like two ranks of leering soldiers one on each side of the street, were as renowned for noise as for neon. In the 30s and 40s there were pushcart hawkers, sandwich sign men, and paperboys, barkers for Burlesque shows and dime museums. Sellers ofThe Daily Worker, The New Masses, and Social Justice added their voices. Sidewalk peddlers and their shills offered watches, radio parts, medicines, and razor blades. Vegetables and fruits spilled from pushcarts. During World War II,Times Square, the hub, or “main stem,” of subway, bus, and train traffic, vibrated to the swinging and swaying energies of GIs and their willing “Victory Girls.” “Pansies” and “androgynes,” taxi dance halls, and newsstands with girlie magazines and spicy detective stories gave 42^nd Street especially the sound and look of the pre-war “Nickel Empire,” Coney Island.

In the late 40s and 50s auctions and bargain sales were held in ground floor auditoriums open to the street, music blared from record stores, and shoe shine boys shouted their trade. In the 60s and 70s “flyboys” handed out notices for the peep shows, prostitutes and drug dealers propositioned likely marks, and three-card monte games were everywhere. Alcoholics and bag ladies muttered; evangelist preachers were on their soap boxes day and night. Rotten fruit, cheap perfume, marijuana, greasy hamburgers, and car exhaust were, in one decade or another, typical air borne attention getters.

In 1954, the Board of Estimate responded to the complaints of the Times and the Merchants Association with more zoning changes which prevented new businesses of the most space-hugging, noisy, and garish types. The changes were also aimed at reducing the non sex-related outlets which had sprung up as satellites of the theaters, movies, and dance halls: “shooting galleries, skee-ball and amusement centers,” open-front stores and juice stands, sidewalk cafes, flower salesmen, ground floor auction rooms, record shops and taxi dance halls broadcasting loud music to attract attention, “lurid, sexy, and sadistic movie advertisements,” “gift shops of a junky nature,” and, mirabile dictu, “live turtle emporiums.” Are turtles sleazy? Maybe it was the decals on their shells. In any event, what took their place were the general-interest book stores,

which, because they carried hard boiled detective stories, non fiction about “sinful cities of the world,” and erotica (hot stuff under the counter), were called “tourist bookstores.” Prurient curiosity drew men from all parts of the US, and the five boroughs.

These outlets did bring with them the nuisance sounds of loudspeakers, barkers, peddlers, and bootblacks. Their customers were common people of all ages, be they white, black, brown, or yellow. The echoes of resentment they felt toward the disdainful owners and managers of upscale clothing stores, play houses, hotels, and financial institutions surely can be heard in the bitter voices of New Yorkers who despise the Giuliani-time banishment of all honky-tonk from Times Square.

The racial, class, ethnic, and national make up of that parade contributed to make a “Felliniesque” mystique out of the sleaze. It fascinated writers such as Jack Kerouac (The Town and the City, 1950) and William Burroughs, who befriended street hustler Herbert Huncke. Kerouac wrote of the inter-racial, zoot-suited or dungareed “cats and characters.” He and Alan Ginsberg found the late-night derelicts at the Pokerino mysteriously enduring, and archetypically Beat. Street life equally fascinated photographer Rudolph Burckhardt, who did two short documentaries on 42^nd Street. The first, in 1967, captures a mostly Caucasian, conventionally dressed crowd; the second, in 1976, shows much more of an underclass Black and Hispanic counter culture. Adult Book Stores, Live Peeps, “Love Teams,” and flamboyant macks had replaced a more varied, midway type carnival with novelty and magic shops, dime museums, and juice stands.

Don de Lillo’s Running Dog (1978) depicts a scene in which “everybody’s in costume. Cowboys, bikers, drag queens, punk rockers, decoy cops, Moonies, gypsies, Salvation army regulars, process evangelists in dark capes, skinhead Krishna chanters in saffron robes and tennis sneakers, . . . glitter and trash everywhere. Hot pants, blonde wigs, slouch hats, silver boots. . . . Priests, doormen, movie ushers, French sailors, West Point cadets, waitresses in dirndls, Shriners wearing fezzes.” Michael Perkins (1984) tells us about “the hard-eyed young hustlers in tight jeans, the pimps, chicken hawks, skinny whores in high heels, transvestites, panhandlers and red-eyed bottle babies, bag ladies, drug dealers, junkies, derelicts, crazies, peddlers and small-change con men.

The title of this piece is an over statement, and an indulgence. One thing clear in Bob Dylan’s great song is the contrast between high and low, culture and vulgarity, refined and common. Cinderella, Ophelia, Romeo, Einstein, T S Eliot, Casanova are all outlawed, or having their faces rearranged (if they are lucky, by Bob Dylan). Respectable? You’d better leave. It’s going to rain, and the Carnival is starting. Dr Filth—he could be anyone. At midnight, the homeland security troops will come and it’ll be kerosene for anyone who knows more than they do. Wait, it’s already happened. Giuliani. Disney. Corp Bloomberg.