JACK BIBLO,
USED BOOKSELLER FOR HALF A CENTURY,
DIES AT 91
It’s been a while since the bustling stretch of Fourth Avenue from Eighth to 14th Streets had more than 30 stores specializing in rare, out-of-print or merely used books. It is a tribute to Biblo & Tannen’s standing, not to mention the proprietors’foresight in buying their building in 1955, that when it finally closed in 1979 it was one of the few survivors of a storied tradition.
For someone who never fulfilled his dream of reading every book in the public library, Mr. Biblo had quite a run for himself. From the time he opened the first Biblo bookstore on 14th Street in 1928 until he and his partner, Jack Tannen, closed their last store, at 63 Fourth Avenue, between 9th and 10th Streets, he had helped sell hundreds of thousands of books and become something of a local institution.
Mr. Biblo also did quite well for someone whose formal schooling ended with the eighth grade, but then he received a remarkable advanced education at what it would be a shame not to call Biblo Tech. Which is to say he was at once self-taught and got all of his book learning by haunting New York public libraries.
To hear him tell it, Mr. Biblo, an East New York native whose original name was Biblowitz, could hardly have avoided developing a love of books growing up in a Brooklyn neighborhood that attracted Jewish immigrants of such passionate intellectual, social and cultural interests that when they weren’t giving street corner speeches they would be boning up at the local library.
It was a tribute to Mr. Biblo’s personal passion for reading that when he found the libraries in East New York and neighboring Brownsville too crowded for comfort he would walk to more deserted libraries in Ridgewood and other less bookish neighborhoods.
After leaving school Mr. Biblo held a series of odd jobs, among them working on a horse-drawn laundry wagon and as a waiter in the Catskills, but he preferred the leisurely life of reading, so much so that by the time he read his way up to the main branch of the New York Public Library, his mother provided the daily dime to cover his subway fares.
The son of a man who worked in distribution for the Hearst newspapers (but would not allow a copy of what he regarded as scurrilous yellow journalism into his home) Mr. Biblo later ran a newsstand on 47th Street in Manhattan, did well enough to finance a three-month hitchhiking trip across the country, then returned determined to enter the book business.
Borrowing $300 from his mother, he opened his first store at age 22 on 14th Street in Manhattan and a few months later converted one of his regular customers, Jack Tannen, a tie salesman, into a full partner.
The two Jacks quickly became the odd couple of Book Row. Mr. Tannen, who died in 1991, was a highly gregarious sort, an aspiring actor who loved the limelight, while Mr. Biblo was almost a sobersides, a quiet, reserved man who provided a counterweight to his irrepressible partner.
In a notoriously marginal business, whose need for low rents made Fourth Avenue an ideal location, the partners had a rough going in the early days, often sleeping in their store overnight so they could get to the Salvation Army warehouse early enough to have their pick of the day’s offerings before opening the store at 9 and keeping it open until midnight to squeeze in every available customer.
Like other stores at the time what kept Biblo & Tannen going during the Depression was a lucrative under-the-counter trade in what booksellers called erotica and the courts condemned as pornography.
The partners also developed an expertise in first editions, but while other stores specialized in specific areas, like art or music, their store, which eventually stocked 100,000 books, covered the waterfront.
Along the way the partners started a reprint publishing house, Canaveral Press, which specialized in reissues of works in the public domain but also issued previously unpublished works by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the creator of Tarzan, a Biblo favorite.
Indeed, after a flare-up of allergies, an occupational hazard of a musty business, forced Mr. Tannen to retire, and Mr. Biblo to open a smaller store that his wife Frances still operates in Brooklyn Heights, Mr. Biblo said reading every book in the public library was not his only unfulfilled ambition.
He had also, he said, dreamed of going to Africa to look for Tarzan.
In addition to his wife he is survived by a sister, Lillian Goodman of Baton Rouge, La., and a brother, Albert, of Miami.
June 18, 1998