Queer Places:
Stanford University, Old Union 232, Stanford, CA 94305
Yale University (Ivy League), 38 Hillhouse Ave, New Haven, CT 06520
41 W 47th St, New York, NY 10036
16 E 46th St, New York, NY 10017
Andreas
Brown (April 29, 1933 - March 6, 2020) was the longtime owner of Gotham Book Mart.
An appraiser and archivist, he bought the celebrated mid-Manhattan shop in
1967 from its founder, Frances Steloff and ran it for 40 years. Authors and celebrities who frequented and shopped at the store:
Edward Albee,
W. H. Auden,
Truman Capote,
Jean Cocteau,
E. E. Cummings,
Theodore Dreiser,
Allen Ginsberg (worked as a clerk at the Gotham),
George Gershwin and
Ira Gershwin,
Martha Graham,
Lillian Hellman,
Katharine Hepburn, James Joyce, Alison Lurie, H. L. Mencken, Henry Moore,
Marianne Moore,
Anaïs Nin,
John Dos Passos,
Ezra Pound,
Man Ray, J. D. Salinger, Dame
Edith Sitwell,
Patti Smith (worked at Scribner's, around the corner, as documented in her memoir, Just Kids. She hung out at Gotham Book Mart and they later published her chapbook Witt),
Stephen Spender,
Gertrude Stein,
Rudolph Valentino,
Gore Vidal,
Andy Warhol,
Edmund White,
Thornton Wilder,
Tennessee Williams (worked as clerk at the store, lasting less than a day).
Brown was a book and manuscript appraiser in his 30s and a regular visitor to
the Gotham from California when, in 1967, Miss Steloff invited him out to
lunch. About to turn 80, she offered to sell him the Gotham, an overstuffed
repository of avant-garde publications that she had opened in 1920. Brown had
never dreamed of moving to New York or becoming a retailer. But here was an
offer he couldn’t refuse — even if, as it turned out, Miss Steloff never
completely let go of the Gotham. She remained at her post in an alcove in the
store, located in a five-story townhouse on West 47th Street, and in her
apartment upstairs. She collected a paycheck until she died in 1989 at 101.
“At the time she sold me the store,” Brown recalled in 1990 at his alma mater,
San Diego State University, “she said, ‘It’s very important that you know you
are not the owner, you are only the caretaker of the store.’” Like Miss
Steloff, Brown was hardly an indifferent sales clerk. Nor was he a great
businessman. But he was passionate about books (he also collected vintage
postcards), and the Gotham remained more like a salon than a store. Stacks of
novels, magazines, reference books and unidentified volumes in still-unpacked
cartons towered precariously on the creaky wooden floorboards at what had
become a sanctuary for celebrated authors, embryonic writers and aficionados
of contemporary literature — the last of the literary landmarks that once
dotted Fifth Avenue and vicinity. A sign outside the store counseled, “Wise
Men Fish Here.” That catchphrase was crafted in cast iron by the artist John
Held Jr. and had been suggested years earlier by Miss Steloff’s husband, David
Moss. Among the sage anglers who frequented the Gotham or fished there from
afar were Saul Bellow, Arthur Miller, Marianne Moore and the reclusive J.D. Salinger, who would show up at the
store with his face concealed under a baseball cap and would immediately leave
if recognized. Brown helped popularize
Edward Gorey, the enigmatic illustrator, by placing his books by the cash
register. He archived Tennessee
Williams’s papers. Jaqueline Onassis became a regular customer. Once, when
her daughter, Caroline Kennedy, told Brown that unless she completed a term
paper on the Russian monarch Catherine the Great by the next morning she
wouldn’t be allowed to go away for the weekend, he delivered a dozen books to
her apartment.
Andreas Brown was born on April 29, 1933, in Coronado, Calif., and raised in
San Diego. His father, Harvey Clair Brown, was an entrepreneur. His mother,
Helene Kimball, was a homemaker. Even as a child, Brown said, he was “fatally
addicted to book collection.” His ambition, though, was to be a lawyer. His
boyhood heroes were Clarence Darrow and Eugene V. Debs. After graduating with
a bachelor’s degree in economics from San Diego State in 1955, he received a
scholarship to Stanford Law School. But he left in his third year,
disappointed that many of the other students lacked his idealism. He enlisted
in the Army and joined the Judge Advocate General Corps. After leaving
military service, he taught in the speech department at San Diego State and
conducted research in bibliography at the University of Texas and at Yale. His
career was nearly cut short in the 1960s when he and a friend were driving in
Bulgaria one night and struck a farmer’s horse cart. They had also overstayed
their visas. “We were practically off to hard labor when the American
government intervened, and we paid some money and got out,” he told The New
York Times in 1989. Settling in California, he became a literary appraiser,
which brought him to New York and to the Gotham store, where he met Miss
Steloff.
Frances Steloff had arrived in New York City in 1907 from Saratoga Springs,
N.Y., with a third-grade education, barely out of her teens, and took a job
selling corsets at a department store in Brooklyn. During the Christmas rush,
she was transferred to the book department and became hooked. She opened her
own store on West 45th Street in 1920 (the Gotham moved to 41 West 47th in
1946). She initially drew theatrical and literary personalities and, defying
censors, smuggled in the works of
D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller. After Miss Steloff died, competition from
online sites, astronomical rents and a failure to digitize inventory created
financial challenges for Brown, along with litigation. He became embroiled in
a lawsuit with Joanne Carson, the former wife of Johnny Carson. She said she
had lent him $640,000. He maintained it was an investment. Brown agreed to
turn over $1.4 million (with interest after more than a decade) to Carson
under a settlement in 1997. In 2003, Brown sold the West 47th Street building,
where he lived, for $7.2 million. The next year he opened the Gotham Book Mart
& Gallery at 16 East 46th Street, the site of the H.P. Kraus antiquarian
bookstore, which had closed in 2003. In 2006, with the store’s $51,000 monthly
rent overdue, the landlords started eviction proceedings and seized the
inventory. It was sold at auction for $400,000. In 2008, 200,000 items were
donated anonymously to the University of Pennsylvania. Brown had never quite
succeeded in reconciling the Gotham’s congenial chaos with the exigencies of
breaking even. “The customers love the nostalgia; they don’t want it to
change,” he told The Times in 2001. “But if you’re trying to run the store,
the nostalgia wears thin very quickly.” He was, his friend Allan M. Jalon, a
journalist, said in a phone interview, a self-described Daoist, but his
hankering for harmony was routinely tested. Brown himself once recalled:
“Before I came here and owned it, I was an organized person. I believe in
having things filed away and in retrievable order.” But, he added, “The more I
straightened things out, the more customers complained.”
Brown died on March 6, 2020, at 86. His lawyer, Eric Sherman, said the cause
was pneumonia.
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