I met the bookseller and onetime radical Walter Goldwater in the fall of 1965 through the good offices of the pianist Jacob Lateiner and his then-wife Vera. When the Lateiners heard from me that I was interested in politics, that I liked to read such intellectual magazines as Partisan Review and Dissent, and that I had once played a lot of tennis, they fairly cackled with pleasure at the prospect of bringing Walter and me together. They told me that he had been a Trotskyite, owned a New York bookstore specializing in radical literature, and loved playing tennis rather more than life itself.

This discussion with the Lateiners had taken place during the preceding summer, and when I got back to New York I paid my first call on Walter at his University Place Bookshop. Located in a large store on the side of the ineffably seedy Albert Hotel, the shop was of a piece with its brother Broadway and Fourth Avenue bookstores one and two blocks over. Shelves crammed with usually tattered books and going all the way to the (very high) ceilings, several enormous tables piled with even more tattered and in any case vastly uninteresting books, everywhere was disorder, dust, and, much worse, the faint smell of cat urine. This smell, by the way, seemed to mark every secondhand bookstore south of Fourteenth Street, with the exception, of course, of the Strand, sui generisin its lack of smell as it was in every other