Cafe Bizarre - Beatnik club

Found- a rare piece of Beatnik ephemera, a card from New York's Cafe Bizarre with the phone numbers and name of Rick Allmen who started the club in 1957. The Cafe Bizarre was one of the better known clubs to capitalise on the beatnik phenomenon, and the venue for many counterculture poets and musicians of the period. Musitron Records even recorded an album of Beat festivities at Cafe Bizarre in the late '50s. (In the post-beatnik-era Andy Warhol discovered The Velvet Underground there.) Another band who played there was the Lovin' Spoonful who described the place as a 'little dump' (1965 -post its Beatnik Glory).They played 3 gigs a night and were paid with tuna fish sandwiches, ice cream and occasionally peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. More can be found at Rock and Roll Roadmaps.

Barron's Textbook Exchange, Brooklyn 1941

Found on the front endpaper of an American book on Abraham Lincoln -- this bookplate label advertising a used bookstore. This store was the first business of the still extant and flourishing Barron's  textbook business and the owner started out mimeographing textbooks in the basement of the shop long into the night after the shop was closed. As Publisher's Weekly noted in 2011: 'In 1941, the after-hours mimeograph business became Barron's Publishing, and its first offering was the aptly named series Barron's Regents Exams and Answers...Seventy years later, the series is still going strong, albeit with some innovations—apps, e-books, and a subscription-based Web site—that could never have been imagined in 1941.'

He was still around and working in 2011 when he celebrated 70 years of business, which dates this label from the early 1940s. Of note is the broad range of business he was engaged in  - used books, stationery, art supplies, records both classical and modern, gym wear and even new books...this kind of enterprise is still needed to survive in the book trade.

Lotos Club, New York - The Ace of Clubs

The Ace of Clubs

That’s what Mark Twain called New York ‘s famous Lotos Club, which still exists.  Founded in 1870 by a group of writers and critics, it seems, back then, to have been a sort of plusher Groucho Club. Its first home was at 2, Irving Place, off 14th Street. The early leading lights were, like Twain, high powered journalists; but before too long, scholars, artists, collectors and connoisseurs had joined the throng. Within two years the Club had outgrown its quarters and had moved to more spacious premises in Fifth Avenue. Here members might live semi-permanently.

Thomas W. Knox  (1835 – 96), adventurer, soldier, popular author and journalist, had begun as a teacher, left to join the gold rush and when the Civil War broke out in 1863 was made a colonel in the Californian National Guard, but  was invalided out and subsequently became a war correspondent for the New York Herald. He then travelled the world, initially with the Russo-American Telegraph Company, and from the 1880s, when not travelling abroad, had an apartment at the Lotos Club. By 1889, it would appear that he had lost his taste for ‘parties and receptions’. In this letter to fellow journalist Alphonse Miner Griswold, popularly known as ‘The Fat Contributor’, politely declining an invitation, Knox writes that ‘for the past two years and more I have altogether ceased to be a society belle (sic)…I’m nearly always in bed by 11 pm.’

But Knox’s taste for adventure never waned. In 1896, just seven years after writing to Griswold, Knox died at his beloved Lotos Club after returning from the Sahara. He was just 60. Griswold had predeceased him in 1891 aged 57. It must have been all that rich Lotos Club food. The Club is still famed for its Michelin star cuisine.[RH}