Wise Men Fish Here: The Vanished Cathedral of the Gotham Book Mart

There is a phrase a literary pilgrim learns to say almost as a prayer: Wise Men Fish Here. For most of the twentieth century those three words hung on a wooden sign above a narrow storefront in midtown Manhattan, swinging over the heads of poets, exiles, smugglers of banned books, and a Nobel committee’s anonymous buyers. The Gotham Book Mart is gone now — its sign, its catacombs of stock, its resident cats named after dead authors — but for the pilgrim who measures New York by its bookstores, it remains the most important address in the city precisely because you can no longer walk into it. To stand on West 47th Street today, amid the glitter of the Diamond District, is to perform an act of literary archaeology. This is the story of what stood there, and why wise men, and a remarkable woman, fished here for nearly ninety years.

A fifth-grade education and a tingle up the spine

The Gotham Book Mart opened on January 1, 1920, the creation of a thirty-three-year-old woman named Frances Steloff, who had begun her working life selling corsets and had a formal education that ended at the fifth grade. She had no capital to speak of and no pedigree in the trade. What she had was an instinct so fierce it bordered on the devotional. Her husband at the time, David Moss, supplied both the store’s name and its motto — “Wise Men Fish Here” — a phrase drawn from the spirit of Washington Irving’s Knickerbocker New York, and the illustrator John Held Jr. cut it into the sign that would become the shop’s emblem. The first store was a cramped basement on West 45th Street near the Theater District. It would not stay small or quiet for long.

Steloff ran the Gotham as a sanctuary for writing that the rest of the country was busy banning. She stocked and quietly distributed copies of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer when both were illegal contraband in the United States, and when Anaïs Nin fled Paris, it was Steloff who safeguarded her books. She was a defendant’s friend and a censor’s nightmare. To Arthur Miller, who knew the shop for decades, the Gotham was an irreplaceable civic organ. “It’s impossible to imagine New York City without it,” he said — a sentence that now reads less like praise than prophecy.

The James Joyce Society and the chair where T.S. Eliot sat

In 1946 Steloff bought the five-story building at 41 West 47th Street from Columbia University for $65,000, and the Gotham settled into the address that would define it. The Diamond District grew up around the shop — jewelers and gem cutters trading in carats on either side — while inside, the trade was in something less tangible and, to a certain kind of pilgrim, more precious.

In February 1947, in the rooms above the selling floor, the James Joyce Society was founded at the Gotham. The Joyce bibliographer John J. Slocum served as its first president; Steloff herself was its first treasurer. The society’s very first member, the person who paid the inaugural dues, was T.S. Eliot. The detail is almost too perfect — the most demanding poet-critic of the age signing up at a Manhattan bookshop to keep faith with the most demanding novelist of the age. The society met at the Gotham for years, and the store became, in practice, a literary salon dressed as a place of commerce: poetry readings, art exhibitions, launch parties, arguments that spilled from the back rooms into the stacks.

The most famous photograph of poets ever taken

If one moment fixes the Gotham in the imagination, it is the evening of November 9, 1948. The store threw a reception for the visiting English aristocrats of letters, Dame Edith Sitwell and her brother Sir Osbert Sitwell, and Life magazine sent photographers to capture it. The resulting image — shot by Lisa Larsen, a German immigrant and one of Life‘s first female photographers, who was only about twenty-three — became, in Michiko Kakutani’s later phrase in The New York Times, “one of the most remarkable gatherings” of poets in the twentieth century. Andy Warhol kept a copy. It has been called, simply, the most famous photograph of poets ever taken.

Look at who is crammed into that back room, surrounded by shelves: W.H. Auden perched on a ladder; Elizabeth Bishop standing against the bookcase with Marianne Moore seated before her; Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Richard Eberhart, and the Filipino poet José García Villa arrayed behind the seated Sitwells; Delmore Schwartz and Randall Jarrell in front; Stephen Spender, Horace Gregory, Marya Zaturenska, William Rose Benét, and Charles Henri Ford filling the frame. The Sitwells sat enthroned at the center — Edith, as the critic Blake Morrison later wrote, “wearing a crown” while Osbert held “the posture of a benign but all-powerful ruler,” the whole tableau an image of “the Sitwells holding court.”

The pilgrim should know that the photograph’s serenity is a fiction. Elizabeth Bishop, who detested the result, left a withering record of the chaos. “There were difficulties in separating the poets from the non-poets,” she recalled, “some of whom wanted to be in the picture, too.” The poets were, as James Merrill put it, “herded without apology into a back room,” where they “tripped over trailing wires and jostled each other to get in the front row, or in the back row, depending.” William Saroyan was so offended at being barred from the shoot that, by Steloff’s account, he never returned to the store. Even Sir Osbert was nearly thrown out of his own party — the publisher Jim Henle was heard “beseeching a photographer, ‘No, no, don’t throw him out of the picture! That’s Sir Osbert!'” Auden, by Bishop’s telling, was one of the few enjoying himself: he “got into the picture by climbing on a ladder where he sat making loud, cheerful comments over our heads.” At one point he handed Vidal the nearest book to hand — John Dewey’s Problems of Men. Bishop’s verdict on the photograph was a small masterpiece of spite: “I had hoped that this photograph, so unflattering to almost everyone in it, would never be seen again.” It is, of course, the most reproduced literary photograph of its century.

Cats named for dead authors, and a basement called the catacombs

Part of what made the Gotham a pilgrimage and not merely a shop was its texture. The walls were thick with photographs of the writers who had passed through. Steloff — and later her successor — kept cats named for literary figures: Thornton, for Wilder; Christopher, for Morley; Mitchell, for the publisher Kennerley; and, inevitably, a cat named Pynchon. Much of the real inventory was not even visible. The proprietors acquired stock from literary estates and let books appreciate in storage cellars that came to be known, only half-jokingly, as “the catacombs.” The Nobel Prize committee in Stockholm was known to order books from the Gotham when weighing candidates for the prize — which meant that somewhere in those catacombs, the future of literary immortality was occasionally being quietly shipped to Sweden.

The roll of customers reads like a syllabus: E.E. Cummings, Theodore Dreiser, Eugene O’Neill, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, John Updike, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, H.L. Mencken, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Charlie Chaplin, Jean Cocteau, Martha Graham, Buckminster Fuller. Some of the most famous names worked the floor before they were famous: Allen Ginsberg clerked at the Gotham, as did LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka). Tennessee Williams is said to have lasted less than a day as a clerk. Patti Smith, working around the corner at Scribner’s, haunted the place; the Gotham later published her chapbook Witt. Woody Allen, a devoted buyer of film books, called it “everyone’s fantasy of what the ideal bookshop is.”

The Steloff handoff and the Gorey years

In 1967 Frances Steloff sold the store to a book lover named Andreas Brown — though “sold” undersells the transaction’s strangeness. She told Brown plainly that he was not to think of himself as the owner but as the “caretaker” or “custodian.” She continued working at the shop as a consultant and lived in the apartment above it for years. She died in 1989 at the age of 101, having watched her store outlast Prohibition, censorship trials, two world wars, and the entire careers of most of the writers in the 1948 photograph.

Under Brown, the Gotham became the commercial flagship of the artist and author Edward Gorey, whose macabre, cross-hatched universe found its perfect home there. Brown and Gorey became friends; the store published fifteen of Gorey’s books and sold his calendars, cards, and prints, and its gallery hosted exhibitions and signings. When Gorey died in 2000, Brown was named a co-executor of his estate. For a certain generation of pilgrim, the Gotham was as much Gorey’s shrine as Joyce’s.

The final chapter on West 47th Street

The end came the way it has come for so many beloved bookstores: rising Manhattan rent, the arrival of book superstores — a Barnes & Noble opened just around the corner — and the tidal shift of the internet age. In 2003 Brown sold the 41 West 47th Street building for $7.2 million, and in 2004 reopened a few blocks away at 16 East 46th Street as the Gotham Book Mart & Gallery. But the new location never found its footing. By 2006 the store had fallen behind on rent of roughly $51,000 a month, and the landlords moved to evict. On May 22, 2007, the entire inventory — an estimated $3 million in books — was auctioned in a single lot for a bid of $400,000 to the landlords’ representative. The wise men’s fishing hole had run dry.

The story has a coda that every pilgrim should carry. In late 2008 the University of Pennsylvania received more than 200,000 items from the Gotham’s inventory as an anonymous gift, and Penn Libraries undertook to catalog, digitize, and exhibit the Gotham Book Mart Collection. In spring 2019 Penn mounted an exhibition of some 300 items at the Kislak Center, fittingly titled “Wise Men Fish Here.” The New York Public Library’s Berg Collection, meanwhile, holds the Gotham Book Mart records — typescripts, correspondence, a scrapbook, and the photograph of that 1948 Sitwell reception. The shop is gone; the fishing was not in vain.

Walking the ground today

For the pilgrim, 41 West 47th Street is the address that matters. The block sits between Fifth and Sixth Avenues in the heart of the Diamond District, a short walk from Bryant Park and the New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building on Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street — itself a sister shrine well worth pairing with this stop. The 47th–50th Streets / Rockefeller Center station (B, D, F, M) and the Fifth Avenue stations along 42nd Street put you within a few minutes’ walk. There is no plaque to find, no doorway to enter; the storefront has long since been folded back into the jewelry trade. What you can do is stand on the sidewalk, look up to where the sign once swung, and remember that Auden sat on a ladder here, that Eliot signed the Joyce Society’s roll upstairs, that a woman with a fifth-grade education kept the avant-garde alive when the law would not.

To see the Gotham as it was, the pilgrimage now runs through archives rather than aisles: the NYPL’s Berg Collection for the 1948 photograph and the shop’s papers, and the University of Pennsylvania’s Kislak Center for the bulk of the surviving collection. And to carry the spirit of the place into a living bookstore, walk south and west to the Strand at Broadway and 12th, or the rare-book floors of the city’s surviving independents, and look for the same thing Frances Steloff trusted above all: the book that is more than a few months old, kept on the shelf by someone who believes it ought to be there. That belief was the Gotham’s true inventory. It is the one thing the auctioneer could not sell.

Will

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