NOTES OF A USED AND OUT-OF-PRINT BOOK DEALER

Issue 13. September 21, 2001 Part I.

Continental Books publishes this free biweekly email newsletter for customers and interested others.

We veer off our chosen path to accommodate the World Trade Center news. Our aim: To contribute to the joint understanding of our situation. We will come together if we share honestly what we see and know; and we will be close enough to what-is (or, if you like, reality) for our acts to succeed. Stay alert, your steady eye guiding your steady hand. Let the hammer hit the nail on the head.

For the first time we have the writings of another author. Commander Ed Seebald of the United States Coast Guard. He was stationed in a building at the southern tip of Manhattan on September 11, 2001, to the left of the Staten Island Ferry Terminal and facing Governor's Island, five blocks south of ground zero. He became deeply involved in the events around him at the time of the attack and in the hours following and he took time in the middle of the night, early September 12th, to type out a memoir of his day. It is a graphic, gripping account. It has been circulating around the Coast Guard. We have Seebald's permission to print it here.

Commander Seebald asks that anyone moved to contribute money consider the Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund. This bond brokerage firm lost about 700 of its staff, a devastating hit for any human group. See their emergency web site at http://www.cantor.com/

Because of the length of the memoir this issue comes to you in two parts.

• Part I
1. Observation. Walking around the premises.
2. Book Trade: Ned Polsky discovers another avocation
3. Book Titles. Circling the periphery.
• Part II
4. 4. Memoir by a U.S. Coast Guard officer of his up-close experiences on
5. 9/11/01, southern tip of Manhattan.
6. 5. The Editor's note. The bright side.

A PERSONAL NOTE

I missed most the attack even though I am in Manhattan and have a window looking out to the southern skyline. No excuse, I had been up early and took a nap at the wrong time and then failed to look out until I got word from the Internet. I did walk down towards the site in the afternoon and saw the unexpected pancake collapse of Building 7. A sharp crack and then in an moment the fall-down The few hundred I was with let out an involuntary moan as a musical accompaniment.

The police presence and the control they exerted, while in retrospect perhaps necessary and sensible, were experienced as oppressive, for they were thwarting our curiosity and the need to see; the drive, in a way, to complete the experience. The denial and shock most of us fell into was in part sustained by this blocking off. Ground zero became a private space reserved for specialist workers and very important political persons. It became taboo for the ordinary citizen.

The sacrifice of some 300 firemen and police who had rushed to the scene was immediately understood and broadcast. But the fate of the workers and executives and visitors who didn't or couldn't evacuate the fatally injured buildings didn't come to the active consciousness of the rest of us until a few days into the disaster when their families and friends began posting letter sized announcements around town. A photograph, a description of age, weight, scars, tattoos, type of jewelry and watches, where employed. These were mainly young people in the early stages of their careers. One can sense their energy and vitality from the images. The word "Missing" is repeated again and again. The tragedy starts to have a face and a personality and you avert your eyes.

REMEMBERING NED POLSKY

I started noticing books for sale around town with Ned 's blind stamp imprinted on the flyleaf. "What is this," I thought, "Polsky's private library loose and on the run?" And I posed the question to the web eye, the all-knowing oracle, and I learned that Polsky was dead and had been for over a year.

Ned Polsky , 1928-2000, was most famous for his book "Hustlers, Beats and Others" considered by many both a sociological and a literary masterpiece. His research as participant observer into a topic most others approached from the assured non-objectivity of law enforcement established his reputation. But this was not his only career. He, it turns out, was a 3-cushion pool player of note, a literary editor, a teacher, a novelist manquŽ, and, not unexpectedly for this newsletter, a book dealer.

I met him a few years back when I visited his office and storeroom in a converted factory on 10th Avenue, a building, if I may exaggerate a little, almost entirely surrounded by prostitutes, which, given Polsky's interest in the demimonde, seemed appropriate. A number of book dealers had congregated together in this place and I, hearing about it late, found no usable space left. But this failed action lead me to Polsky twice, and I had the pleasure of chatting with him and comparing notes.

Polsky's shop was one floor above the others, a square room about 40 feet to the side, about 15 feet high with windows along one side high up right under the ceiling. Light came in but no vision out. Polsky had a table in front, to the left as one entered, which he used as a desk, with a telephone, and some files near by. The rest of the room was given over to shelves loaded with books, deep steel shelves ten feet high freestanding with books placed on either side. Several thousand books, all biographies: That was his specialty and the reason he got to dealing books. He had a life-long interest in collecting facts. This lead him to encyclopedias where he regularly encountered inadequate life histories, and this lead him to the book-length biographies themselves, closer to the detail he craved. As with other collectors, he discovered that he had to sell in order to own. And there he was. A story of seduction by the logical progression of one's own discoveries to an unanticipated conclusion.

I wish I had known him better.

There is an obituary by Robert Kahn, University of Michigan at http://www.asanet.org/footnotes/nov00/departments.html (scroll down the page for the article).

For a review by Polsky of the Florida 3-Cushion Open in 1998 see http://www.uscarom.org/Newsletters/1997/fl-3-cushion-open.htm

A Letter to the Editor of N.Y. Times by Polsky complaining of a review of David Markson's "Reader's Block" that ran off in the wrong direction. Feb. 2, 1997 http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/02/02/letters/letters.html

NOTE ON BIBLIOGRAPHY

It seems obvious to me that all book people will turn to their favorite resource to provide context for the September 11th attack. I will cite a few titles of books and a web site that have been a useful frame for my window. These are not head-on, all or nothing assaults; they are more on the periphery from where we can circle in toward the center.

1. Weingarten, Arthur. THE SKY IS FALLING. 1977. A report on the crash of a B-25 bomber into the Empire State Building on July 28, 1945. This was an accident due to the navigational error of an army pilot flying a plane with which he was not familiar.

2. O'Neill, Richard. SUICIDE SQUADS OF WORLD WAR II. 1981. So far I have only read the first part of this book. A lot here for engineers and boat builders interested in the construction and evolution of various kinds of weapons. Also descriptions of actual military operations involving suicidal and near suicidal actions. The first section argues, using the example of the Japanese Kamikaze, that suicide missions depend on the ethical and philosophical beliefs held by those who carry them out.

3. Searls, Hank. THE LOST PRINCE. Young Joe, the Forgotten Kennedy, The Story of the Oldest Brother. 1969. The oldest son of the famous Kennedy clan of Boston died on a near suicidal mission over the English Channel in World War II. This biography traces young Joe's willingness to take the risk to the overbearing ambition of the father. A very sad story that was made into a movie.

4. http://www.janes.com has Jane's Intelligence Digest. a surprisingly detailed news source.

5. Hammel, Eric. THE ROOT. The Marines in Beirut, August 1982 - February 1984. (1985). Describes the U.S. Marine intervention in Lebanon and the suicide attack on their barracks that killed 241 of our men.

6. Two novels that are an easy way into history and culture:

--Frank, Bruno. A MAN CALLED CERVANTES, 1935. The author of Don Quixote was a contemporary of Shakespeare, and his life is equally obscure. In this version he fought in the naval battle of Lepanto against a Turkish fleet and was later captured by pirates and held for a number of years in Algiers.

--Benard, Cheryl. MOGHUL BUFFET, 1998. A murder mystery that takes place in Peshawar, a city on the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan. The author has a particular interest in women's issues in the region and, from the viewpoint of the West, does a pretty even-handed job.

7. Glines, Carroll V. ATTACK ON YAMAMOTO. 1990. In 1943 Admiral Halsey, on receiving intelligence of the date and time of Admiral Yamamoto's expected arrival by plane at Bouganville, ordered a fighter plane attack even though the distance out and back was at the limit of possibility. Yamamoto, the most American of the Japanese commanders, was killed.

Copyright Alvin Katz 2001