Charles Mysak looks a bit like Larry David but he certainly acts like him, complaining about the dogs and grackles that crap all over his store. It’s difficult to fend them off, though, considering his store is squatting on a section of a sidewalk on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
Mysak has been selling used books from the back of his Honda Civic for a little over a decade. He pulls in $100 a day and pays his “rent” in quarters, feeding $36 to the parking meter that marks his store’s address.
“In the old days, you could tie your horse to this, and no one would get a ticket,” he recently told the NY Post.
Mysak remains indignant. And wIth book stores closing across the country, maybe Mysak has the right idea by taking it to the street.
Below is a short documentary by NYU film student Alden Peters.
Click here for films from Peters.
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– Benjamin Samuel is the Online Editor of Electric Literature. Because of his Larry-Davidian paranoia of bedbugs, he has trouble buying anything from the sidewalk.
The one thing I’ll always love about Bedford Avenue is it’s used books vendors.
“its”, not “it’s”. I need a beer.
[...] Meet Charles Mysak, cigar-puffing bookseller extraordinaire – I’ve always been a fan of strong real-life characters, and there are certainly plenty of those in the wonderful world of books. Take cigar-puffing Charles Mysak, who has sold books on the sidewalk of Manhattan’s Upper West Side for over ten years. Thanks to the posting efforts of Electric Lit and the documentary skills of NYU film student Alden Peters, you can spend 15 minutes in the presence of an extraordinary man. [...]