ABSTRACT
B orn in Holland in 1942, the bookseller Jaap Reitmancame to America in the 1960s and worked in the store of George Wittenborn (1908-1974), the most sophisticated Manhattan retailer of art books for decades after World War II. Located uptown at 1018 Madison Avenue, just below 79th Street, Wittenborn complimented the galleries that were also in his Upper East Side neighborhood. Quite simply, he stocked art books, especially from Europe, that no one else had. Realizing in the early 1970s that SoHo needed a comparable resource, Reitman opened his eponymous store, originally located on the street level at the northeast corner of West Broadway and Spring Street, literally at the intersection of the neighborhood’s two main streets. Reitman established reliable relationships with galleries and museums around the world to get enough copies of their latest catalogs. An attentive retailer, he got to know his customers as well, regularly telling them as they walked into his store if a title new to his stock should interest them. Such thoughtful retailing resulted in shaping the community’s literacy, for instance giving downtown artists a greater access to European “theory” than would otherwise be possible. Certain kinds of books, such as those from a Seattle small press called Bay, he sold better
than anyone else. He profited enough to take a taxi daily to his family’s apartment on the Upper East Side.
