The Art of Business>Business Profile

By the Book: Howard Frisch Antiquarian Books
By Mala Hoffman . Photos by Michael Fredericks

As befits a bookseller, Howard Frisch has a lot of stories. There’s the one about how he got started in the used book business, 50 years ago next year, in Greenwich Village. “I started a store without any purpose. It had artwork, illustrations, books,” the 87-year-old Frisch told me. “It was on Christopher Street opposite what is now the Lucille Lortel Theater. I had to have a couple of jobs to support it. Well, there were peddlers with barrels who would sell whatever they picked up on the street. They got to know I’d buy whatever books they had. Gradually, the books squeezed out everything else, and it became a bookstore.”

Then there’s the story about how he and his partner Fred Harris moved the business to the small village of Livingston, in Columbia County, 33 years ago. Frisch was introduced to the area by friends who had a house there, and he started renting an apartment and commuting down to New York City. In 1970, he and Harris came upon a piece of property that included a turn-of-the-century carriage house and a smaller building. The day he purchased them both, Frisch took a walk around the corner and came upon a boarded-up building that had been used as a general store. “The store was shuttered up, and there were boxes and old furniture inside,” he said. “I asked the owner, what’s that? And he said, well, we haven’t been able to sell it, and I said, yes, you have.”

The original mahogany and cherry wood shelves were soon packed with Frisch’s books and Howard Frisch Antiquarian Books had its new home. Over the years, Frisch and Harris enlarged their collection and expanded the store, but, as Frisch is quick to point out, it was a different time for booksellers, particularly for those who sold used books. “There were bookstores all over the country. Who could count them?” he noted. “We were all colleagues. We bought and sold to each other when we needed to.” The pair took yearly excursions to Europe, where they selected large pictorial books to round out their selections, and traveled around the United States as well.

Then, Frisch explained, almost overnight the nature of the business changed. “Along came the Internet,” he said. “If you had books either you wanted or wanted to sell, you used the Internet.” Though Frisch and Harris survived, there were many casualties—the magazine Antiquarian Book Dealer, which had been almost the bible for the industry for 50 yeasr, collapsed within the span of one year, and many small bookstores around the country closed. “We kept this store going until we did get into the Internet,” Frisch said. “Why? Because we liked it. It was our life here.”

Though Frisch laments the passing of an era (“We lost our contacts with other book dealers,” he said. “They disappeared. It’s really sort of a tragedy”), for Harris the change presented an opportunity. “The Internet is a big part of our business,” Harris observed. “It was created for book dealers like ourselves. It’s a valuable resource for getting stock and for selling stock.”

Harris says that he tries to keep the Internet offerings and the store stock separate, since the store stock is sorted by subject and the Internet books are categorized by number. “If it goes on a shelf by subject, I’d never find it again,” he laughed. Though he acknowledges that choosing what goes where is “rather arbitrary,” some of the most successful Internet sales have involved collections. One, of works related to fashion maven Diana Vreeland, was sold to a buyer in Bangkok, Thailand. And a new library just purchased from the estate of a former customer contains a collection of works by and about Anthony Trollope that Harris feels would be a good candidate as well. “It’s very comprehensive. It’s biographies and critiques as well as the works themselves,” he pointed out. “I think it would be very interesting for us to put it into the Internet.”

For a while, Howard Frisch Antiquarian Books only operated as an Internet service, with the store open only by appointment. But two years ago, after Internet sales dropped as a result of September 11, Frisch’s accountant suggested reopening the building. “We jumped at it,” Frisch said. “And the customers were so happy. They said, ‘Thank heavens there’s a place where we can look at a book, and hold it in our hands.’” The store is now open on weekends from 10AM to 4PM and by “chance or appointment.”

The fiction and literature sections are filled, as are those for science and history and a children’s corner. There is also a table of new acquisitions and a performing arts room, with books on music, drama, and art. Glass cases hold the more valuable books, including 30 volumes of Thackery’s works dating from 1891 for $250 and a complete works of Tennyson from 1893 on sale for $75, though the most valuable books are stored elsewhere. Generally, almost every book that is already in print is 50 percent off the list price, but Frisch emphasizes that pricing the antique books is more involved. “How do you decide the price of a book? There’s no one way,” he said. “Not all older books are valuable because they’re older.”

But for a reader, a book of interest is always valuable. It’s something Frisch understands quite well. “As a child, I used to read The Three Musketeers and cry, and David Copperfield. That was my reading.” As to why, however, he demurs. “Of the making of books, there is no end,” he said. “That’s in the Bible. If they couldn’t tell you why, how can I?”

Howard Frisch Antiquarian Books is located at 411 Church Rd. just off of Route 9 in Livingston. Call (518) 851-7493 for more information or go to the Web site at www.howardfrischbooks.com.

Preferred Customers
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sked about why they have been successful for so many years, Fred Harris cites the “broad clientele base” the store has built. “It’s amazing the knowledge of people who come in,” he says. “They ask about particular authors, and are always pleased when we can produce them.”
That kind of customer loyalty explains the broad nature of the book selections available at Howard Frisch Antiquarian Books as well. According to Harris, many longstanding customers have left instructions that their libraries be offered to the booksellers. “Essentially, that’s how we generate most of our books,” Harris adds. “We are fortunate in that we don’t really need to go to the book sales. We’ve been in the business so long, and Howard is so knowledgeable, that the owners will not necessarily leave the books to us, but will indicate that we should be given the offer.”
There have also been particular requests; one customer only wants pre-1900 books that are nicely bound. Another will only take suggestions from Frisch himself, and has a standing order of “whatever Howard sets aside for me.” Then there was the time that an unnamed actor playing an unnamed writer in an unnamed historical movie wanted the first printing of the first edition of said author’s book. But one of Frisch and Harris’s favorite customer tales involves an elementary school-aged child who came in with his father.
“He went over to the children’s corner while his father and I were talking,” Frisch recalls. “All of a sudden, he came over and said, look dad, I’ve been looking for this book for years!” Given that it was Animal Stories by Rudyard Kipling, Frisch and Harris could tell that the boy knew his stuff.