1937 Caught in the Fortean nexus, he was, himself, disdainful of Forteans.
Benedict Abramson was born 25 August 1898 in Kadenei, Lithuania. I cannot find him in the U.S. census from 1910 or 1920—not especially surprising, really—but later records indicate his family emigrated early in the new century, reaching New York (from Hamburg, Germany) on 3 July 1901, aboard an unknown ship. They then made their way to Chicago, supposedly reaching it on 6 July. Ben—as he became known—was the eldest of five children, all the others born in Chicago.
The Abramsons were Jewish—it may be that they left their homeland because of anti-Semitism—and found support from the Jewish community. Benedict attended the Jewish Training School of Chicago, which had been established by German Jews at the end of the 19th century to help assimilate immigrants to their new homes. At first, the school’s course focused on handwork—in addition to language and history—hoping to create a class of Jews who were not peddlers. Abramson attended toward the end of the school’s career, when there was some debate over whether it was still necessary, and apparently when clerical and related skills were also being taught. He when he was 18—so around 1914.
Benedict Abramson was born 25 August 1898 in Kadenei, Lithuania. I cannot find him in the U.S. census from 1910 or 1920—not especially surprising, really—but later records indicate his family emigrated early in the new century, reaching New York (from Hamburg, Germany) on 3 July 1901, aboard an unknown ship. They then made their way to Chicago, supposedly reaching it on 6 July. Ben—as he became known—was the eldest of five children, all the others born in Chicago.
The Abramsons were Jewish—it may be that they left their homeland because of anti-Semitism—and found support from the Jewish community. Benedict attended the Jewish Training School of Chicago, which had been established by German Jews at the end of the 19th century to help assimilate immigrants to their new homes. At first, the school’s course focused on handwork—in addition to language and history—hoping to create a class of Jews who were not peddlers. Abramson attended toward the end of the school’s career, when there was some debate over whether it was still necessary, and apparently when clerical and related skills were also being taught. He when he was 18—so around 1914.
From his naturalization papers, 1939. Abramson went to work in the book business, which was then booming in Chicago. This was the time of the Chicago literary renaissance. Book stores were salons, of a sort, staying open late at night, where authors and their readers congregated. Abramson was a stock boy for Alexander Caldwell McClurg and a clerk at the Economy Bookstore. Having learned the trade, Abramson struck out with Jerrold Nedwick; they opened their own bookstore. This was on Wabash Avenue. I do not know if the store was called Argus at time time; at some point, though, Nedwick left to open his own bookstore—another long-time institution, Chicago a city with a rich culture of bookselling—and Abrams ran his own, either continuing the earlier store or now founding Argus. It was no later than 1922.
Abramson’s bookstore would become a hotspot for the Chicago literary set. He had a puckish sense of humor—in later catalogs, he would advertise books that did not exist (either revealing the hoax of saying the book had already been sold, if someone inquired, depending upon his read god the requestor’s personality). He later wrote, “I remember that in 1922, four months after I started in the book business for myself, Marshall Field & Company announced an exhibition of historical relics—the bed in which Napoleon slept with Josephine, the coat that Abraham Lincoln wore when he was shot, the pen used by Lincoln to sign the Emancipation Proclamation, etc. Not to be outdone, I too had a window display of historical relics—a button from the vest of Dr Lee Alexander Stone, the famous Chicago sexologist, a lock of Emile Zola’s hair, the pipe smoked by Edgar Lee Master, three of Miss Edna Ferber’s pubic hairs, two of Miss Fannie Hurst’s pubic hairs, and one of Fanny Hill’s pubic hairs.”
In 1923, he married. His wife was Molly Niemkovsky, a Russian Jew. Her family had emigrated around the same time as Ben’s—1903—and settled in Chicago. She attended the Chicago Musical College, graduating in 1918, a pianist of some skills. She performed in public concerts after graduation, in Chicago at Jewish gatherings, and also through the Pacific northwest, Canada, and Alaska, accompanied by her brother, Sol, who was a violinist. The wedding was on the 16th September, just after Ben had turned 25 and Molly 23. Their only child, Deborah, was born 31 May 1924.
According to Chicago journalist and bibliophile Vincent Starrett. Abramson’s store on Wabash was utilitarian, dark, without many windows. In 1928, he moved the shop to 333 South Dearborn, which was reportedly similarly non-descript. Many famous literary characters haunted the aisles: Starrett himself, and Edgar Lee Masters and Christopher Morley. He knew Tiffany Thayer—then not a writer—and was friends with the magazine publisher William B. Ziff—Ziff Davis put out pulps, and at some point Abramson developed a taste for science fiction. Another patron was “old man Griggs. No one knew how old he was, but some said that he had fought in the Civil War. Griggs was interested in the occult. There were many among out customers interested in the occult; usually in one particular phase of it, demonology, sun worship, spiritism, etc., but Griggs was interested in all of them, black magic, palmistry and the rest and he believed in them all.”
Abramson did business in rare books; he helped collectors. He also was involved with contemporary publishing—he was an early enthusiast of John Stenbeck, and helped him find a wider audience. He was a big fan of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. He spread the word about Lovecraft and science fiction. When Thayer did start publishing, Abramson was a strong proponent. He also had more specialized books for sales behind the counter, as it were: his daughter wrote, much later, “Everyone in Chicago who had anything to do with books knew that Ben sold pornography.”
In 1930, according to the census, the Abramsons lived on Fullerton Parkway, renting the place for a not insubstantial $100 per month. They had a radio and employed a live in servant, a 25-year old Irish immigrant named Honor Carey. All of which suggests that Abramson was making a solid income running his bookstore. Their home was in the newly created 44th ward—part of the city’s northward expansion and growth—near the lakefront, but still in an immigrant enclave, judging by the neighbors on the census form.
In 1936, Abramson started publishing his own magazine—I believe that this was his first venture into publishing, though I could be wrong, and it would not be his last. The debut issue of “Reading and Collecting” was dated December 1936—making it contemporaneous with the beginning of Thayer’s Fortean Society magazine, which was conceived in 1936 and born in September of 1937. Abramson wrote, “Frankly, I want to expand my audience, to spread my enthusiasm about certain books to a wider radius. I want to extend the knowledge of book collectors about the books they collect, both on the material and the literary side. I want to tell collector facts that will interest them about the book they hold in their hands and the book the read. I want to talk about writer and their experiences about books and their history. About typography, binding, illustrating, publishing, collecting, and selling I want to establish an intimate relationship between collectors and those who have produced the books they collect.” This venture lasted 15 monthly issues, dying at a time when Thayer’s magazine was also struggling to find footing.
At the same time, Abramson was working to become a citizen. He had done some international traveling in early 1936 as a non-citizen—probably work related, since his wife wasn’t with him—and then in December 1938 petitioned for naturalization. The process relatively quickly. He received his papers on 22 March 1939. These dates suggest that it may have been the hostilities in Europe which prompted him to finally make official his citizenship status. According to the 1940 census, the family was doing all right, but had possibly suffered some declining fortunes across the Depression. Ben made $3,900 the year prior, about $67,000 in current moneys. They were still renting—now a place on Agatite Avenue—for $75 per month. This was still the lakefront area. The family also employed Hattie Freeman, a black live-in servant.
The bookstore moved again in 1940, this time to 16 North Michigan, subletting from Cook’s Travel Bureau. Global events made international travel difficult, and so the rent was cheap. The rooms were wide and the windows looked out on Lake Michigan. Four years later, Abramson moved the shop to New York, at 3 W. 46th Street; his daughter said no one really knew what prompted the move. Certainly Chicago’s literary scene had declined, but that had taken place in the late 1920s, which doesn’t really explain the timing. Perhaps it had something to do with the war. Perhaps it had something to to with Abramson wanting to be more involved in publishing.
Because in the 1940s, he deepened his publishing activities. In 1946, he published Lovecraft’s “Supernatural Horror in Literature” and Derleth’s Lovecraft memoir. The next year he put out J. O. Bailey’s thesis about history of Science Fiction “Pilgrims Through Space and Time.” In 1949, Abrams joined the Sherlock Holmes fan club The Baker Street Irregulars and put out the first issue of the group’s magazine, “The Baker Street Journal,” which lasted 13 quarterly issues. (A later journal would succeed it.) He also put out “The Painful Predicament of Sherlock Holmes (with Starrett doing the introduction) in 1955. As G.I.s returned from Europe, they brought with them books banned in the U.S., including Henry Miller’s books; Abramson bought these and re-sold them. (Checks from Abramson provided Miller with funds during some very lean years.) He had put out Miller’s The World of Sex in 1940 (while still in Chicago) and, in New York, “Aller Retour New York.”
By the end of the decade, Abramson’s health was declining. He apparently had a nervous breakdown in 1949. Looking to recuperate, he moved the store—yet again—this time 50 miles up the Hudson River to Mohegan Lake. By accounts, though, the business was expensive, and the returns not so good. After four years, he returned to Chicago and reopened Argus on the 8th floor of a building very near his first store, at 218 S. Wabash Avenue. By this time, he was mostly doing his business by mail, which accounts for him not needing street front property. It was a coming home in more ways than one: this was the building once occupied by A. C. McClurg & Co., where Abramson had started.
But the business was no longer the same, and neither was his health. Abramson. He died 16 July 1955, a little more than a month before his 57th birthday. The bookstore was shuttered 31 August. “Ben was one of the last sweetly screwy booksellers,” wrote Herb Graffis in the Chicago Sun Times. “He was a round cultural peg who never was bothered by not fitting into a square economic hole.” He was cremated, and his ashes scattered under the windows of the Newberry Library’s Rare Book Room windows, along the lakeshore, several miles north of Abramson’s longtime stomping grounds. Mollie would live on for more than three more decades, dying in Skokie, Illinois, 26 November 1986.
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Exactly when Abramson became acquainted with Charles Fort is not known. As a bookseller, and one interested in slightly off-trail topics, it is likely that he knew of Fort from very early on; maybe not “The Book of the Damned,” but probably “New Lands.” More importantly, he knew Tiffany Thayer. Again, the exact date is not known. There are letters between them dating back to the early 1930s, by which time Thayer had moved to Hollywood to try his hand at writing for the movies. Almost certainly, though, their friendship dates to the early 1920s, when Thayer was working at another bookstore in Chicago. For what it’s worth, then—and I am not sure that it is worth much—Thayer was especially close to a pair of Russian Jews who had made their way into the book business, Abramson and also Aaron Sussman, whose turn away from publishing and to advertising may have stymied Thayer’s writing career.
After Thayer had moved away from Chicago, Abramson seems to have been his main book dealer—and dealer here should be interpreted as something close to a drug dealer. Thayer liked to collect; he was especially fond of the first issue of small magazines. And even as he opened his own bookstore in Hollywood, he continued to have Abramson hunt him down material. Some time in the early 1930s—after Fort’s death—Abramson provided Thayer with some Fort “material”; I do not know what it was; likely an edition of one of the magazines Fort published in during the early part of the century.
Thayer brought Abramson into the Fortean fold with the very first issue of his magazine—“The Fortean Society Magazine”—dated September 1937. It is worth noting that Thayer and Abramson both embarked on a publishing venture at the same moment; after the worst of the Great Depression had passed, but not a propitious time for new ventures. None of the letters between them that I have seen, though, noticed this coincidence. Abramson was listed on the masthead of Thayer’s publication, one of his “regional correspondence.” In practice, the only requirement for filling this spot seems to have been friendship—or even a bare acquaintance—with Thayer. Most of the other regional correspondents dropped out of the Society quickly, and Thayer did not even have forwarding addresses for them.
Abramson was not so harsh, or so little known, to Thayer that he moved without notice. But, in retrospect, he does not seem to have been any more interested in Fort than the rest who filled the same capacity for other places. Thayer sent Abramson copies of his magazine to sell—even after Abramson’s own publication had ended—but Abramson seems not to have wanted them; he protested that he never ordered them, and did not like being dunned for receiving them. In March of 1941, he offered his nicest compliment to the Society and Thayer’s magazine, a damning with faint praise:
“I can’t promise to do very much with the next issue of the magazine, but I will put it where people will see it. After all, the Fortean Society is a sort of extravagance at the expense of common sense and too many of our customers, alas, don’t want to be extravagant in that way.”
Later that year, Abramson started returning unsold copies of the magazine to Thayer. (Russell tried to do the same, but Thayer would have none of it, telling Russell to give them away free or send them to members of parliament, instead.) His place had no facilities for selling magazines, Abramson protested. The store was on the second floor and did most of its business by mail. Thayer told him the store needed to keep back issues in stock—Abramson was his only known contact in Chicago, and he had to have some place to send inquirers. And then, towards then end of 1941, Thayer sent the latest issue, which bothered Abramson even more—though he expressed his irritation ironically:
“Why in the hell did you send us the damn new issue of The Fortean? We’re on the second floor. We don’t have casual customers. We have nobody who wants the damn magazine. If I send them back right away, you’ll get sore. If I wait a week or two and send them back, you’ll get mad. If I wait a month or more and send them back, you’ll get desperately vociferous and malignantly abusive. I think that the Fortean Society is a beautiful illusion. My customers care nothing about illusions. They love you as a writer; they love me as a bookseller; they don’t care anything at all about Charles Fort. So tell me, my Tiffany, what should I do with the five copies that you sent of the November issue?”
Thayer insisted, and reiterated his reasons: “Those five magazines are not in your way. Just leave them on a table or shelf face up. I must have a place to buy it and I am out of touch with everybody in the Chicago book business but you.” Abramson relented: “All right, I will keep the magazines on display.” Little did he know what he was getting himself into, though. Thayer was clearly planning to get the magazine back into the public discussion—by penning his notorious “Circus Day is Over,” which cost him many of the Founders and got him investigated by the FBI. In February 1942, he wrote Abramson—sending him more magazines, charging him for them (!), and seeming to rub his hands in glee about the storm he was to cause: “Ten copies of the January 1942 issues of the Fortean Society Magazine have been sent to you on consignment at 30% discount. We will bill you later. Please do NOT return unsold back numbers at this time since we feel certain the January issue will sell the others if you have them available.”
The matter was no different with Fort’s omnibus or the Fortean Society. Abramson wanted to sell Thayer’s works, not Fort or the Society. He continually pleaded with Thayer to finish “Mona Lisa,” his proposed novel on early modern Italy; there was even an announcement in the early 1940s that the book was to be published, which prompted Abramson to make pre-sales; but that deal fell through and Thayer did not get the work out until the mid-1950s. After Abramson moved to New York and started publishing more, he tried to put out an omnibus edition of Thayer’s novels, but that also never came to fruition.
Thayer, though, was insistent on having Abramson sell the omnibus Fort, which was published in April 1941. (It’s funny that the book, widely available in America, could not find buyers, while in England, where it was hard to get, buyers kept approaching Thayer—possibly giving him a false sense of how desired it was.) In April, Thayer told Abramson to order 1,000 copies of Fort’s omnibus—a joke, clearly—and tried to plan some advertising:
“I am told Alexander Woollcott is appearing in one of your local playhouses. He is a notorious Fortean and I am writing to him that you have a supply of the book and that May 5th is Alexander Woollcott-Charles Fort Day in your bookstore. I don’t know exactly what there is for him to autograph but my God! between you you should be able to think up something for him to do in this connection. Get him into your store and get some ads in the papers and let’s sell the book. Holt will consign as many copies as you think you can sell. I am putting a reporter from the Daily News in touch with you to help with publicity. All out, my lad.”
Abramson, though, was having none of it: “Alexander Woollcott is but another pachyderm in the circus of life and why should the populace be excited because another elephant’s trunk is supplicant for peanuts? I bought five copies of the Books of Charles Fort and I will be very lucky if I sell four of them. To the all too few many who ask about Tiffany Thayer I say, ‘The author of Thirteen Men and Thirteen Women and the rest looks like his own office boy.’ Dear Tiffany, you do, but unfortunately not only do you look like your own office boy but think and act like your own office boy. Forget Fort. He is dearth and desolation and death. Remember yourself and rejoice.”
Thayer tried to turn the crack around—he admitted he may look and act like an office boy, but Abramson had the soul of one. The joke, though, may have cut too close to the quick for both men. Thayer was working in advertising then, which paid the bills, but not was what he had wanted to do. And Abramson was mostly doing mail order sales, which cut off the personal connections that had made the work exciting in the early 1920s, when he started out. At any rate, Abramson apologized: he’d had too many drinks when he dictated that letter. His irritation was that Thayer was squandering his talents on the Fortean Society—he was an entertaining writer who had numerous readers. “I still think the Fortean business is phony, but not you,” Abramson said.
And so Abramson continued to sell the books, though they hardly moved off the shelves—a fact that he thought was generally true. He told Thayer, “Ask Henry Holt how many copies we sold of The Books of Charles Fort. You’ll be astounded.” Eventually two did go out—but to the same person, one Donald Hoffman; Abramson wrote Thayer telling him to send Hoffman back issues of the magazine. Otherwise, Abramson continued reporting lack of sales throughout 1941. You should pay less attention to the Fortean Society,” he lectured, “and more to your true forte, the writing of books.”
Late that year, in October, Thayer tried to cajole Abramson onto joining the Society—apparently even when he was a regional correspondent, he did not belong—but Abramson remained uninterested. “Why should I join the Fortean Society?,” he asked, and as far as I can tell from the correspondence, there was no answer. Thayer must have thought he was getting everything he could from Abramson and not pressed the issue—which is saying something, since Thayer was not one to usually withhold. Abramson pointed out that Hecht was writing something about the new omnibus Fort, which seems to suggest that he thought that was enough.
The correspondence ended a few years later, in 1944, when Abramson moved to New York City. Presumably, they met instead, or called, or had just drifted apart and so rarely talked, Abramson selling his books by mail and doing some publishing—reinvigorating, perhaps, the early enthusiasms—while Thayer continued busy with the Society and advertising, only rarely publishing anymore. Which would seem to end the story, Abramson related to the Forteans by negation—the way critics of anything are necessarily connected to what they criticize.
And yet—and yet.
His store did stock the books, and other authors, some closely related to Fort, some less obviously. And while he may not have sold many, he did sell some, in the process making apparent the intellectual community in which Forteanism was ensconced, the avant-garde modernism that united, say, Fort and science fiction and surrealism.
The poet and publisher Jonathan Williams remembers, as a child fascinated with Lovecraft and other writers of the weird, he made his way to Argus bookstore after a dispiriting outing to the theater: “And so I was very involved with Lovecraft, and Lovecraft sent me, by chance, to a bookshop where I bought Patchen. The Argus Book Shop, which was one of the great bookshops of its time, run by a man by the name of Ben Abramson, who was a friend of people like Christopher Morley and the Baker Street Irregulars. And Tiffany Thayer. People who wrote ‘strangely’ strange . . . the books of Charles Fort. Then I went there one day [. . .] and I saw these curious books on the shelf. Kenneth Patchen books, you know. Hand-painted books. The Journal of Albion Moonlight, Sleepers Awake, et al. So I started buying them. Then I started buying Henry Miller books. Because Ben Abramson had all these things. I went from H. P. Lovecraft to Patchen and Miller like overnight, when I was about sixteen.”
Abramson’s bookstore would become a hotspot for the Chicago literary set. He had a puckish sense of humor—in later catalogs, he would advertise books that did not exist (either revealing the hoax of saying the book had already been sold, if someone inquired, depending upon his read god the requestor’s personality). He later wrote, “I remember that in 1922, four months after I started in the book business for myself, Marshall Field & Company announced an exhibition of historical relics—the bed in which Napoleon slept with Josephine, the coat that Abraham Lincoln wore when he was shot, the pen used by Lincoln to sign the Emancipation Proclamation, etc. Not to be outdone, I too had a window display of historical relics—a button from the vest of Dr Lee Alexander Stone, the famous Chicago sexologist, a lock of Emile Zola’s hair, the pipe smoked by Edgar Lee Master, three of Miss Edna Ferber’s pubic hairs, two of Miss Fannie Hurst’s pubic hairs, and one of Fanny Hill’s pubic hairs.”
In 1923, he married. His wife was Molly Niemkovsky, a Russian Jew. Her family had emigrated around the same time as Ben’s—1903—and settled in Chicago. She attended the Chicago Musical College, graduating in 1918, a pianist of some skills. She performed in public concerts after graduation, in Chicago at Jewish gatherings, and also through the Pacific northwest, Canada, and Alaska, accompanied by her brother, Sol, who was a violinist. The wedding was on the 16th September, just after Ben had turned 25 and Molly 23. Their only child, Deborah, was born 31 May 1924.
According to Chicago journalist and bibliophile Vincent Starrett. Abramson’s store on Wabash was utilitarian, dark, without many windows. In 1928, he moved the shop to 333 South Dearborn, which was reportedly similarly non-descript. Many famous literary characters haunted the aisles: Starrett himself, and Edgar Lee Masters and Christopher Morley. He knew Tiffany Thayer—then not a writer—and was friends with the magazine publisher William B. Ziff—Ziff Davis put out pulps, and at some point Abramson developed a taste for science fiction. Another patron was “old man Griggs. No one knew how old he was, but some said that he had fought in the Civil War. Griggs was interested in the occult. There were many among out customers interested in the occult; usually in one particular phase of it, demonology, sun worship, spiritism, etc., but Griggs was interested in all of them, black magic, palmistry and the rest and he believed in them all.”
Abramson did business in rare books; he helped collectors. He also was involved with contemporary publishing—he was an early enthusiast of John Stenbeck, and helped him find a wider audience. He was a big fan of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. He spread the word about Lovecraft and science fiction. When Thayer did start publishing, Abramson was a strong proponent. He also had more specialized books for sales behind the counter, as it were: his daughter wrote, much later, “Everyone in Chicago who had anything to do with books knew that Ben sold pornography.”
In 1930, according to the census, the Abramsons lived on Fullerton Parkway, renting the place for a not insubstantial $100 per month. They had a radio and employed a live in servant, a 25-year old Irish immigrant named Honor Carey. All of which suggests that Abramson was making a solid income running his bookstore. Their home was in the newly created 44th ward—part of the city’s northward expansion and growth—near the lakefront, but still in an immigrant enclave, judging by the neighbors on the census form.
In 1936, Abramson started publishing his own magazine—I believe that this was his first venture into publishing, though I could be wrong, and it would not be his last. The debut issue of “Reading and Collecting” was dated December 1936—making it contemporaneous with the beginning of Thayer’s Fortean Society magazine, which was conceived in 1936 and born in September of 1937. Abramson wrote, “Frankly, I want to expand my audience, to spread my enthusiasm about certain books to a wider radius. I want to extend the knowledge of book collectors about the books they collect, both on the material and the literary side. I want to tell collector facts that will interest them about the book they hold in their hands and the book the read. I want to talk about writer and their experiences about books and their history. About typography, binding, illustrating, publishing, collecting, and selling I want to establish an intimate relationship between collectors and those who have produced the books they collect.” This venture lasted 15 monthly issues, dying at a time when Thayer’s magazine was also struggling to find footing.
At the same time, Abramson was working to become a citizen. He had done some international traveling in early 1936 as a non-citizen—probably work related, since his wife wasn’t with him—and then in December 1938 petitioned for naturalization. The process relatively quickly. He received his papers on 22 March 1939. These dates suggest that it may have been the hostilities in Europe which prompted him to finally make official his citizenship status. According to the 1940 census, the family was doing all right, but had possibly suffered some declining fortunes across the Depression. Ben made $3,900 the year prior, about $67,000 in current moneys. They were still renting—now a place on Agatite Avenue—for $75 per month. This was still the lakefront area. The family also employed Hattie Freeman, a black live-in servant.
The bookstore moved again in 1940, this time to 16 North Michigan, subletting from Cook’s Travel Bureau. Global events made international travel difficult, and so the rent was cheap. The rooms were wide and the windows looked out on Lake Michigan. Four years later, Abramson moved the shop to New York, at 3 W. 46th Street; his daughter said no one really knew what prompted the move. Certainly Chicago’s literary scene had declined, but that had taken place in the late 1920s, which doesn’t really explain the timing. Perhaps it had something to do with the war. Perhaps it had something to to with Abramson wanting to be more involved in publishing.
Because in the 1940s, he deepened his publishing activities. In 1946, he published Lovecraft’s “Supernatural Horror in Literature” and Derleth’s Lovecraft memoir. The next year he put out J. O. Bailey’s thesis about history of Science Fiction “Pilgrims Through Space and Time.” In 1949, Abrams joined the Sherlock Holmes fan club The Baker Street Irregulars and put out the first issue of the group’s magazine, “The Baker Street Journal,” which lasted 13 quarterly issues. (A later journal would succeed it.) He also put out “The Painful Predicament of Sherlock Holmes (with Starrett doing the introduction) in 1955. As G.I.s returned from Europe, they brought with them books banned in the U.S., including Henry Miller’s books; Abramson bought these and re-sold them. (Checks from Abramson provided Miller with funds during some very lean years.) He had put out Miller’s The World of Sex in 1940 (while still in Chicago) and, in New York, “Aller Retour New York.”
By the end of the decade, Abramson’s health was declining. He apparently had a nervous breakdown in 1949. Looking to recuperate, he moved the store—yet again—this time 50 miles up the Hudson River to Mohegan Lake. By accounts, though, the business was expensive, and the returns not so good. After four years, he returned to Chicago and reopened Argus on the 8th floor of a building very near his first store, at 218 S. Wabash Avenue. By this time, he was mostly doing his business by mail, which accounts for him not needing street front property. It was a coming home in more ways than one: this was the building once occupied by A. C. McClurg & Co., where Abramson had started.
But the business was no longer the same, and neither was his health. Abramson. He died 16 July 1955, a little more than a month before his 57th birthday. The bookstore was shuttered 31 August. “Ben was one of the last sweetly screwy booksellers,” wrote Herb Graffis in the Chicago Sun Times. “He was a round cultural peg who never was bothered by not fitting into a square economic hole.” He was cremated, and his ashes scattered under the windows of the Newberry Library’s Rare Book Room windows, along the lakeshore, several miles north of Abramson’s longtime stomping grounds. Mollie would live on for more than three more decades, dying in Skokie, Illinois, 26 November 1986.
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Exactly when Abramson became acquainted with Charles Fort is not known. As a bookseller, and one interested in slightly off-trail topics, it is likely that he knew of Fort from very early on; maybe not “The Book of the Damned,” but probably “New Lands.” More importantly, he knew Tiffany Thayer. Again, the exact date is not known. There are letters between them dating back to the early 1930s, by which time Thayer had moved to Hollywood to try his hand at writing for the movies. Almost certainly, though, their friendship dates to the early 1920s, when Thayer was working at another bookstore in Chicago. For what it’s worth, then—and I am not sure that it is worth much—Thayer was especially close to a pair of Russian Jews who had made their way into the book business, Abramson and also Aaron Sussman, whose turn away from publishing and to advertising may have stymied Thayer’s writing career.
After Thayer had moved away from Chicago, Abramson seems to have been his main book dealer—and dealer here should be interpreted as something close to a drug dealer. Thayer liked to collect; he was especially fond of the first issue of small magazines. And even as he opened his own bookstore in Hollywood, he continued to have Abramson hunt him down material. Some time in the early 1930s—after Fort’s death—Abramson provided Thayer with some Fort “material”; I do not know what it was; likely an edition of one of the magazines Fort published in during the early part of the century.
Thayer brought Abramson into the Fortean fold with the very first issue of his magazine—“The Fortean Society Magazine”—dated September 1937. It is worth noting that Thayer and Abramson both embarked on a publishing venture at the same moment; after the worst of the Great Depression had passed, but not a propitious time for new ventures. None of the letters between them that I have seen, though, noticed this coincidence. Abramson was listed on the masthead of Thayer’s publication, one of his “regional correspondence.” In practice, the only requirement for filling this spot seems to have been friendship—or even a bare acquaintance—with Thayer. Most of the other regional correspondents dropped out of the Society quickly, and Thayer did not even have forwarding addresses for them.
Abramson was not so harsh, or so little known, to Thayer that he moved without notice. But, in retrospect, he does not seem to have been any more interested in Fort than the rest who filled the same capacity for other places. Thayer sent Abramson copies of his magazine to sell—even after Abramson’s own publication had ended—but Abramson seems not to have wanted them; he protested that he never ordered them, and did not like being dunned for receiving them. In March of 1941, he offered his nicest compliment to the Society and Thayer’s magazine, a damning with faint praise:
“I can’t promise to do very much with the next issue of the magazine, but I will put it where people will see it. After all, the Fortean Society is a sort of extravagance at the expense of common sense and too many of our customers, alas, don’t want to be extravagant in that way.”
Later that year, Abramson started returning unsold copies of the magazine to Thayer. (Russell tried to do the same, but Thayer would have none of it, telling Russell to give them away free or send them to members of parliament, instead.) His place had no facilities for selling magazines, Abramson protested. The store was on the second floor and did most of its business by mail. Thayer told him the store needed to keep back issues in stock—Abramson was his only known contact in Chicago, and he had to have some place to send inquirers. And then, towards then end of 1941, Thayer sent the latest issue, which bothered Abramson even more—though he expressed his irritation ironically:
“Why in the hell did you send us the damn new issue of The Fortean? We’re on the second floor. We don’t have casual customers. We have nobody who wants the damn magazine. If I send them back right away, you’ll get sore. If I wait a week or two and send them back, you’ll get mad. If I wait a month or more and send them back, you’ll get desperately vociferous and malignantly abusive. I think that the Fortean Society is a beautiful illusion. My customers care nothing about illusions. They love you as a writer; they love me as a bookseller; they don’t care anything at all about Charles Fort. So tell me, my Tiffany, what should I do with the five copies that you sent of the November issue?”
Thayer insisted, and reiterated his reasons: “Those five magazines are not in your way. Just leave them on a table or shelf face up. I must have a place to buy it and I am out of touch with everybody in the Chicago book business but you.” Abramson relented: “All right, I will keep the magazines on display.” Little did he know what he was getting himself into, though. Thayer was clearly planning to get the magazine back into the public discussion—by penning his notorious “Circus Day is Over,” which cost him many of the Founders and got him investigated by the FBI. In February 1942, he wrote Abramson—sending him more magazines, charging him for them (!), and seeming to rub his hands in glee about the storm he was to cause: “Ten copies of the January 1942 issues of the Fortean Society Magazine have been sent to you on consignment at 30% discount. We will bill you later. Please do NOT return unsold back numbers at this time since we feel certain the January issue will sell the others if you have them available.”
The matter was no different with Fort’s omnibus or the Fortean Society. Abramson wanted to sell Thayer’s works, not Fort or the Society. He continually pleaded with Thayer to finish “Mona Lisa,” his proposed novel on early modern Italy; there was even an announcement in the early 1940s that the book was to be published, which prompted Abramson to make pre-sales; but that deal fell through and Thayer did not get the work out until the mid-1950s. After Abramson moved to New York and started publishing more, he tried to put out an omnibus edition of Thayer’s novels, but that also never came to fruition.
Thayer, though, was insistent on having Abramson sell the omnibus Fort, which was published in April 1941. (It’s funny that the book, widely available in America, could not find buyers, while in England, where it was hard to get, buyers kept approaching Thayer—possibly giving him a false sense of how desired it was.) In April, Thayer told Abramson to order 1,000 copies of Fort’s omnibus—a joke, clearly—and tried to plan some advertising:
“I am told Alexander Woollcott is appearing in one of your local playhouses. He is a notorious Fortean and I am writing to him that you have a supply of the book and that May 5th is Alexander Woollcott-Charles Fort Day in your bookstore. I don’t know exactly what there is for him to autograph but my God! between you you should be able to think up something for him to do in this connection. Get him into your store and get some ads in the papers and let’s sell the book. Holt will consign as many copies as you think you can sell. I am putting a reporter from the Daily News in touch with you to help with publicity. All out, my lad.”
Abramson, though, was having none of it: “Alexander Woollcott is but another pachyderm in the circus of life and why should the populace be excited because another elephant’s trunk is supplicant for peanuts? I bought five copies of the Books of Charles Fort and I will be very lucky if I sell four of them. To the all too few many who ask about Tiffany Thayer I say, ‘The author of Thirteen Men and Thirteen Women and the rest looks like his own office boy.’ Dear Tiffany, you do, but unfortunately not only do you look like your own office boy but think and act like your own office boy. Forget Fort. He is dearth and desolation and death. Remember yourself and rejoice.”
Thayer tried to turn the crack around—he admitted he may look and act like an office boy, but Abramson had the soul of one. The joke, though, may have cut too close to the quick for both men. Thayer was working in advertising then, which paid the bills, but not was what he had wanted to do. And Abramson was mostly doing mail order sales, which cut off the personal connections that had made the work exciting in the early 1920s, when he started out. At any rate, Abramson apologized: he’d had too many drinks when he dictated that letter. His irritation was that Thayer was squandering his talents on the Fortean Society—he was an entertaining writer who had numerous readers. “I still think the Fortean business is phony, but not you,” Abramson said.
And so Abramson continued to sell the books, though they hardly moved off the shelves—a fact that he thought was generally true. He told Thayer, “Ask Henry Holt how many copies we sold of The Books of Charles Fort. You’ll be astounded.” Eventually two did go out—but to the same person, one Donald Hoffman; Abramson wrote Thayer telling him to send Hoffman back issues of the magazine. Otherwise, Abramson continued reporting lack of sales throughout 1941. You should pay less attention to the Fortean Society,” he lectured, “and more to your true forte, the writing of books.”
Late that year, in October, Thayer tried to cajole Abramson onto joining the Society—apparently even when he was a regional correspondent, he did not belong—but Abramson remained uninterested. “Why should I join the Fortean Society?,” he asked, and as far as I can tell from the correspondence, there was no answer. Thayer must have thought he was getting everything he could from Abramson and not pressed the issue—which is saying something, since Thayer was not one to usually withhold. Abramson pointed out that Hecht was writing something about the new omnibus Fort, which seems to suggest that he thought that was enough.
The correspondence ended a few years later, in 1944, when Abramson moved to New York City. Presumably, they met instead, or called, or had just drifted apart and so rarely talked, Abramson selling his books by mail and doing some publishing—reinvigorating, perhaps, the early enthusiasms—while Thayer continued busy with the Society and advertising, only rarely publishing anymore. Which would seem to end the story, Abramson related to the Forteans by negation—the way critics of anything are necessarily connected to what they criticize.
And yet—and yet.
His store did stock the books, and other authors, some closely related to Fort, some less obviously. And while he may not have sold many, he did sell some, in the process making apparent the intellectual community in which Forteanism was ensconced, the avant-garde modernism that united, say, Fort and science fiction and surrealism.
The poet and publisher Jonathan Williams remembers, as a child fascinated with Lovecraft and other writers of the weird, he made his way to Argus bookstore after a dispiriting outing to the theater: “And so I was very involved with Lovecraft, and Lovecraft sent me, by chance, to a bookshop where I bought Patchen. The Argus Book Shop, which was one of the great bookshops of its time, run by a man by the name of Ben Abramson, who was a friend of people like Christopher Morley and the Baker Street Irregulars. And Tiffany Thayer. People who wrote ‘strangely’ strange . . . the books of Charles Fort. Then I went there one day [. . .] and I saw these curious books on the shelf. Kenneth Patchen books, you know. Hand-painted books. The Journal of Albion Moonlight, Sleepers Awake, et al. So I started buying them. Then I started buying Henry Miller books. Because Ben Abramson had all these things. I went from H. P. Lovecraft to Patchen and Miller like overnight, when I was about sixteen.”
