"Hello, Bookstore"

 

My pal Matt Tannenbaum is about to celebrate 50 years as a bookseller.  He made his bones at the Gotham Book Mart, working for the legendary Frances Steloff.  “Always bring the customer with you back to the shelf when he or she asks for a book which you don’t think you have in stock.  Especially if you know you don’t have it.  Your customer is bound to see something else along the way.”  Frances was enormously grateful for having been led into a trade she so cherished, and Matt clearly is, as well.  He once remarked that when you’re young, you’re unlikely to recognize a life-changing event, because you haven’t lived enough of a life to realize it’s going to change.  But that first day Matt walked into the Gotham, he set his life on a different path. 

                                   Matt Tannenbaum - Photo Credit: Bill Shein/Berkshire Argus

It’s enormously satisfying to see somebody imagine a thing, and make it happen.  Matt moved to the Berkshires, in western Massachusetts, and bought his own bookstore, on Housatonic St., in Lenox.  He and the store have been an enduring resource since, for both readers and writers.  Matt is very much a bookman, in the sense of loving everything about them, the texts, the smell, the history.  He’s achieved something not everybody gets, which is to make a vocation from his ardor.  This is a guy who breathes the written word.  And as a kind of grace note, in 2022, during COVID, a filmmaker named A.B. Zax made a documentary called Hello, Bookstore, which is in fact how Matt answers the phone.  I can’t recommend this movie enough.  It’s hugely charming, and a terrific surprise.  I was prepared to like it, of course, because it’s somebody I love and respect, but there’s always your dread going in – like a high school production of Oklahoma – that it’s going to be amateurish and squirmy, and you have to trust me on this one, squirmy it ain’t.  It’s without pretense, and I hope I don’t doom your interest by calling it heart-warming.

https://www.hello-bookstore.com/

I was on the phone with Matt, just the other day, and if I sample a piece of the conversation, it gives you an idea of how his mind works.  He mentioned that he’d struck up an acquaintanceship with Otto Penzler – another bookseller, of course – because of their shared enthusiasm for Charles McCarry.  (McCarry hailed from Pittsfield, MA, just up the road from Lenox, and he and Matt had gotten to be pals; Otto, as a publisher, had anthologized McCarry in several collections, Best American Mystery Stories among them.)  My own acquaintance with Otto is very slight, but I’ve been short-listed several times for BAMS, and the first time I got in was the year it was guest-edited by Donald Westlake.  I told Matt that I wrote Westlake a fanboy thank-you, and we had a desultory correspondence over the next half-dozen years, snail mail, because he didn’t do internet, and his letters were written on a manual, because he didn’t like electric typewriters, either.  He didn’t want something humming at him, he said.  I’m thinking Don punched those keys pretty hard, and he must have gone through a whole bunch of Smith-Coronas over time, because the e was always out of alignment, about a sixteenth of an inch above the line of type.  Matt laughed, and said something about technology, and how of course Westlake was allowed his idiosyncracies, and then he said, You realize there are no rough drafts anymore.  On a computer, you don’t mark up a hard copy, you just overwrite what you wrote before.  It took me a minute to think that through.  Word-processing is a huge convenience, and I, for one, like being liberated.  But the consequence is an actual loss.  What we gain in momentum, we lose by having no record of the process.  It’s a thoughtful insight. 

I’ve had a lot of eye-opening conversations with Matt.  He’s always been a very alert reader.  He was the one who pointed out the elegance of the last line of John Crowley’s Little, Big to me – a shared appreciation – but truth to tell, I’d missed it, first time around.  I think, too, that I would have turned a deaf ear to Lawrence Durrell, if not for Matt.  Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie.  Patrick Leigh Fermor, maybe.  He can be very attuned to what a reader might not realize they’d been missing.  This is the natural magic of the bookshelf, one thing next to another.