The Old Pro

Mysak at work on the corner of 68th and Columbus.

At the corner of 68th and Columbus, across from the Post Office, there is a small, street side used books stand. This easy-to-miss, table and crate operation is run by Charles Mysak.

Mysak is a fixture of a certain stretch of the Upper West Side. Alternately grumpy and effusive, he carries a hardboiled authenticity that is redolent of an older New York.  “I quote Hemingway to the effect that ‘man can be destroyed but not defeated,’” he told me during a meandering chat on a snowy afternoon last week. “And this comes from a man who blew his head off at 60 years old.”

Snow or shine, Mysak, also 60, and his books, some older, some younger, make the commute from Wayne, New Jersey to this familiar curb every morning. However you gauge success, the stand has been open on this very spot for 11 years – outlasting the towering Lincoln Center Barnes and Noble a few blocks down.

Mysak, once a general practice lawyer, has been selling books for more than 20 years. He is an authority on collecting, buying, selling and lugging. If there were such a thing, he would be a professor emeritus of The Book Shelter.

He describes his connection to books with an elegant simplicity. What draws him to them? “Passion for knowledge,” he said.

“Books are the ultimate computer. You can open them up and there you are, depending on where the author wishes to take you. Clearly they’re the method by which one becomes a civilized human being…historically. That and also I’m trying to make a living at it.”

Mysak believes that the love of books, even for the bookseller, is beyond the material. “You can’t measure it. An accountant couldn’t measure it,” he said with a Cheshire grin. 

But he can count the number books in his possession: tens and tens of thousands. Most acquired from a Trenton-based shop, Acres of Books, that closed in the early nineties after the UPenn professor that ran the store died. (“As can happen with people who like books, their children don’t necessarily,” he said.)

In addition to their transcendent value, Mysak is certain his books have practical value as well. You want to learn about revolutions? Here are four volumes of Thomas Paine. Interested in the evolution of political vitriol? Voila, a biography of H.L. Mencken.

Mysak has a particular affection for these two, Paine and Mencken, along with the great American postwar novelists Hemingway and Fitzgerald. He has everything these men ever wrote in his personal collection, which he keeps separate from the books he sells.

After a disheartening reflection on the unhappy ends of both Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Mysak came to a question of enormous importance to The Book Shelter: Does he ever sell from his personal library? “No. I won’t do that,” he stated firmly. “My library is independent of my books.”

But then a slight revision: “Although it’s happened from time to time. Historically of all the great libraries over the course of the hundreds of years they’ve been created (with the possible exception of the Morgan) most of them have had to buy and sell at times.“

The most tragic case of a library lost (after Alexandria) may be that of the avid book collector and all-around brilliant founding father Thomas Jefferson: “Poor old Jefferson gave his [books] to the Library of Congress,” Mysak said shaking his head, “and they burned. The only thing they have left is the inventory of the books.”

 A harrowing reminder that (and perhaps the makings of a post-modern prose poem.)

After taking too much of Mysak’s time, I solicited some words of advice for the amateur collectors like myself. How should we used book enthusiasts approach books?

“Buy them,” Mysak answered. “Come here and buy books.”