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<b>Bonhams:</b> MANDELSHTAM, OSIP. 1891-1938. Autograph Manuscript, 2 pp, [Petersburg,] January 1913, entitled

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Great Bookmen & Bookstores: Israel (Izzy) G. Young of The Folklore Center - By Susan Netzorg Halas Israel G. Young at Folklore Center April 1962 (photo Susan Netzorg). Izzy Young ran the Folklore Center at 110 MacDougal St. in New York City. In the early 1960s he was one of the book world’s most original, influential and at times irritating characters. Born in the Bronx in 1928, Izzy was a little older than the crowd that flocked to his shop, which was indeed a hangout and message central for all the greats, near greats and wanna-be’s in the emerging world of American folk music. I chanced to become a clerk at the Folklore Center because my parents were in the book business and had an uncommon specialty called “Customs and Beliefs” (folklore by another name.) Izzy was familiar with them and so I by extension was deemed a worthy employee. Izzy (or IGY as he called himself) was the hub for all of it. He was my boss for that winter and spring of 1961-62 when the young Bob Dylan wandered through our doors. It was a brief and sunny moment when Izzy discovered the then unknown performer and introduced him to a world populated by luminaries like Peter, Paul and Mary, the Clancy Brothers, Odetta, Theodore Bikel, Dave Van Ronk, and Jack Elliott. All of those talented folk artists and many lesser lights wandered in and out of the Folklore Center swapping gossip, fingering the merchandise, buying a book here and there and endlessly accompanied by the sounds of banjos and guitars being tuned and played in the background. Just the other day I read that Bob Dylan is now 70. Back then Izzy was 34, Jack Ballard (aka Jack Prelutzky), Izzy’s assistant, was 20, Bob Dylan was 20 and I was a barely legal 18. Physically the Folklore Center was not much. It was a long narrow shop, walls lined with books, records and instruments, and a backroom with a fireplace where everyone hung out. I vividly remember sitting there with Dylan. He was the nicest kid you’d ever want to meet, pleasant, talented, low key and earnest. The moment I remember best is when we were paid to distribute leaflets for some Highland dance event. It was a chilly day in the winter of 1961 and instead we fed the flyers to the fire and talked about our respective ambitions. His ambition was to get to know Woody Guthrie better. My ambition was to move out of the vast but freezing loft I rented on the Lower East Side into something smaller with electricity. America in 1961-62 had yet to hear the Beatles and the prevailing ideas of cool were Beatnik inspired. Gerdes Folk City, where Dylan spent a lot of his time, was just gaining steam and folk music was considered to be a short lived hybrid, rather than a part of the mainstream popular music. Dylan would change all that and soon, but none of us knew that yet. The people on MacDougal Street who were considered the real comers were Dave Van Ronk, and “Ramblin’” Jack Elliott, who was once an influence on Dylan and who was rapidly eclipsed by him. That was the winter Izzy who was always ready to back new talent decided the young performer should make his Carnegie Hall debut under the sponsorship of the Folklore Center. As I recall we sold very few tickets (if any) to that event and it was probably the only time in modern history that a Bob Dylan solo appearance did not put money in the pockets of a promoter.
Great Bookmen & Bookstores: Israel (Izzy) G. Young of The Folklore Center - By Susan Netzorg Halas Folklore Center ad Village Voice June 1962. I wish I’d saved some to the memorabilia from that period like the “Talking Folklore Center Blues” that Dylan wrote to commemorate the store. ‘You get a bumper and I'll get a fender We'll go down to the Folklore Center You get a daft and I'll get dizzy We'll go down to see old Izzy What did the fly say to the flea Folklore Center is the place for me. I'll make a pie and you'll make a salad We'll go down to see Jack Ballard What did the belt say to the suspender You got to support the Folklore Center.” I happened to be in NYC on an Antioch co-op job as a puppeteer. As it turned out I could either work the puppets or remember the lines, but could not do both. They fired me. I was young, broke and with winter coming on I went to work at the Folklore Center. Here is an excerpt from the report I wrote for the college 50 years ago: I was literally down to my last 25 cents when I wandered into the Folklore Center (hub of the American Folk Movement on MacDougal Street) and convinced the boss, Israel G. Young, that I was truly the person he was seeking to set his chaotic world in order. I had worked in a bookstore before. I knew bookstores like the palm of my hand. Name a facet of the business and I’d been doing it since before I learned to walk. So he hired me: For $40 a week I worked 50+ hours. To begin with Izzy, my boss, had his own ideas about business procedure. When we got an order with a check, why he’d cash the check. Sometimes he’d send the books, you had a 50-50 chance, but if you sent the check you had a 100% chance he’d cash it. It was our most basic and consistent policy; we always cashed the checks. I spent the first week making files. There were two files: one for bills and one for irate letters. Everything was either a bill or a letter from someone in Omaha who’d sent a check for $5 and two books about nine months ago and still hadn’t gotten his books and this was his sixth letter. I would arrange the letters in order (we never threw anything away so all the irate letters were still there). Letter #1 one would start off a little puzzled…. perhaps the books had gone astray? But by letter #6 they’d read… “You are a cheap crook. Don’t send the books. Send me back my money.” In my desire to square accounts I wasn’t too particular about what went out. I remember the one from a buyer in Kalamazoo who had written us a record number of fourteen letters. Letter fifteen was anguish itself: He now had 4 copies of Pete Seeger’s Banjo Method, 3 copies of Ewan MacColl and 2 of Lead Belly, when what he really wanted was 1 Seeger Guitar Method, 1 Irish Songs of Resistance, and 1 Old English Ballads. He would however be willing to trade. As part of my duties I was assigned the telephone. There was a long list of people for whom Izzy was NOT IN. He was most particularly NOT IN to the bank, the telephone company, the rent collector or the city marshal. If a check bounced it was a “horrible mistake” and the world was “persecuting” him. There was one week we did not bounce a single check; it was a real occasion for celebration. Izzy ran his shop on the theory it was a club. It was there so he could see all his friends and talk to them and find out what was going on. He ran his shop so all his friends would know where to find him. He would be at the shop. He envisioned his position as one of leader, friend, mentor and valiant fighter for Right and Justice. If you worked for him you knew that your employer was Friend of the Underdog, Seer of Future Things to Come, Prophet Without Honor in His Own Time. In short you were working for a Social Institution and it is a well known fact that Social Institutions do not have pay their bills like other people.
Great Bookmen & Bookstores: Israel (Izzy) G. Young of The Folklore Center - By Susan Netzorg Halas Bob Dylan – a Folklore Center discovery, circa early 1960s (photo J. Cohen). Izzy had many thoughts about money: “It’s not fair,” he would say, “Look at me. I’m a good man. I am healthy. I am full of life. I have been in business five years. I am still poor. My mother has never given up hoping that someday I’ll change my mind and become an accountant. ‘You know, Israel,’ she’ll say, ‘there’s still time.’” Let me describe the shop. The shop sells folklore in all shapes and forms: books, records, instruments, magazines, gossip. The retail space is about ten feet wide and sixteen feet long. There is also a back room that is about ten feet square. The back is the most important part. The back has the best toilet on the street and people will sometimes come in for no other reasons than to use the toilet. The back has a fireplace of which Izzy is inordinately proud. We used the fireplace for burning stuff like old newspapers and cardboard boxes, but occasionally for burning stuff like circulars other people had paid us to send out. Two thousand circulars take a long time to burn and make a nice fire. The mantle over the fireplace is covered with souvenirs and papers and other stuff so important that it can not possibly be thrown away. There are always a couple partially assembled musical instruments, an antique writing box, an attaché case, and two cans full of his special wood dye. On top of all this - wadded up in the corner - is his bedding, because at times Izzy didn’t have a place to live, so when he closed the store he just put the bedding on the floor threw some more circulars on the fire and went to sleep. The back room is crowded even when there are no people in it. For some reason when people come into the store the back seems the most desirable of all places and that’s where they congregate. The back fills up quickly. Invariably when there are fifteen people jammed in talking and violating the No Smoking Rule (Izzy can’t stand the smell of smoke but if you are his special friend or a girl you can smoke anyway and he will only make faces). Then, at that very moment he will decide he wants something - Right Now! If you can’t find that something immediately the accusations will begin: “You threw it out. I told you it was important! You threw it out! It’s not fair! Why does everything happen to me?”
Great Bookmen & Bookstores: Israel (Izzy) G. Young of The Folklore Center - By Susan Netzorg Halas Flyer promoting Dylan's thinly attended first NYC concert at Carnegie Hall in 1961 sponsored by F.C. Work at the Folklore Center is never accomplished like work in other places. At the Folklore Center it’s always under fire and in the face of overwhelming obstacles. Izzy will look over your shoulder while you are working until you are ready to scream, and when you do scream he will say: “I’m just trying to find out what’s going on.” Along the right wall was the desk. The bottom drawer of the desk was exclusively reserved for letters people, mostly young girls, had written him and for his voluminous diary. The diary was written in a microscopic hand and traced his life. He filled it with entries, mostly about girls. The bottom draw was sacred: woe unto you if you misplaced something in the bottom drawer. The rest of the desk was filled with paper clips, folk music articles, pens that didn’t work and check books that didn’t have any money in them. The walls are covered with books floor to ceiling. Rounding out the contents of the Folklore Center is the closet for Izzy’s wardrobe, an eclectic collection of Brooks Bros. meets 14^th St, the first aid kit for emergencies, the rack for hanging instruments which never works quite right, the typing table with an electric typewriter (state of the art technology in 1962). There is the red chair for guests, the brown chair for throwing stuff on and the swivel chair where I work or he sits. And then there’s Jack, Izzy’s side kick. In my day Jack was a permanent fixture at the shop. They hold the same philosophy of work. Work is bad. Work is to be avoided. About once a month Jack and Izzy decide to build something, usually a shelf. The process of building a shelf goes something like this: You must first spend at least one full day talking about the shelf - pro and con. Where it will go; its function and whether it is really a good idea to build with the state of the economy at an all time low. Today they decide it is a good idea. Tomorrow they buy the lumber. When the lumber arrives they spend an hour extolling the virtue of this particular lumber and then another hour looking for the saw, hammer and nails. It’s mandatory to make a lot of noise. You could build another Egyptian pyramid faster than Jack and Izzy can build a shelf. It takes another half day to stain the shelf and then another half day to admire it.
Great Bookmen & Bookstores: Israel (Izzy) G. Young of The Folklore Center - By Susan Netzorg Halas Izzy circa 2010 at his Folklore Center in Stockholm, Sweden. The best times are when the shop is empty and we three sit around with cookies and milk and talk philosophy. Philosophy covers a wide range of topics including but not limited to business, making money, why some people are better than others and women. The subject of women is the most complicated and one that does not lend itself to summary. Suffice to say there are two categories of women – Modern Women (bad) and Real Women (good). About once a week Izzy will announce he is in love. Sometimes he will announce it by doing a Morris Dance the length of the shop (“Look how high I can jump!”), or sometimes he will announce it by doing a Horn Dance. Sometimes he will put it in the form of a question: “Am I in Love?” and he will answer it himself: “Yes, I am in love.” Well you get the drift. It was a unique establishment, filled with the ebb and flow of daily events and plenty of home made drama. Those happy innocent bookish days are long gone. And the rest as they say is history. Today Dylan is a household word. Jack Ballard (Prelutsky) is a well known writer of poetry for children. Izzy sends word that he is alive and well and living in Stockholm where since the 1980s he’s run the Swedish incarnation of the Folklore Center and he still teaches contra dancing. Earlier this year he was quoted as saying, “Everyone wants to interview me, nobody wants to pay.” Some things never change. Reach Izzy Young at: Folklore Centrum, Wollmar Yxkullsg 2 bv 118 50 Stockholm Sweden izzy.young@telia.com 08 643 46 27 ------------------------ Reach Susan Netzorg Halas at wailukusue@gmail.com

Great Bookmen & Bookstores: Israel (Izzy) G. Young of The Folklore Center

- By Susan Netzorg Halas

Israel G. Young at Folklore Center April 1962 (photo Susan Netzorg).

Izzy Young ran the Folklore Center at 110 MacDougal St. in New York City. In the early 1960s he was one of the book world’s most original, influential and at times irritating characters. Born in the Bronx in 1928, Izzy was a little older than the crowd that flocked to his shop, which was indeed a hangout and message central for all the greats, near greats and wanna-be’s in the emerging world of American folk music.

I chanced to become a clerk at the Folklore Center because my parents were in the book business and had an uncommon specialty called “Customs and Beliefs” (folklore by another name.) Izzy was familiar with them and so I by extension was deemed a worthy employee.

Izzy (or IGY as he called himself) was the hub for all of it. He was my boss for that winter and spring of 1961-62 when the young Bob Dylan wandered through our doors. It was a brief and sunny moment when Izzy discovered the then unknown performer and introduced him to a world populated by luminaries like Peter, Paul and Mary, the Clancy Brothers, Odetta, Theodore Bikel, Dave Van Ronk, and Jack Elliott. All of those talented folk artists and many lesser lights wandered in and out of the Folklore Center swapping gossip, fingering the merchandise, buying a book here and there and endlessly accompanied by the sounds of banjos and guitars being tuned and played in the background.

Just the other day I read that Bob Dylan is now 70. Back then Izzy was 34, Jack Ballard (aka Jack Prelutzky), Izzy’s assistant, was 20, Bob Dylan was 20 and I was a barely legal 18.

Physically the Folklore Center was not much. It was a long narrow shop, walls lined with books, records and instruments, and a backroom with a fireplace where everyone hung out. I vividly remember sitting there with Dylan. He was the nicest kid you’d ever want to meet, pleasant, talented, low key and earnest. The moment I remember best is when we were paid to distribute leaflets for some Highland dance event. It was a chilly day in the winter of 1961 and instead we fed the flyers to the fire and talked about our respective ambitions. His ambition was to get to know Woody Guthrie better. My ambition was to move out of the vast but freezing loft I rented on the Lower East Side into something smaller with electricity.

America in 1961-62 had yet to hear the Beatles and the prevailing ideas of cool were Beatnik inspired. Gerdes Folk City, where Dylan spent a lot of his time, was just gaining steam and folk music was considered to be a short lived hybrid, rather than a part of the mainstream popular music. Dylan would change all that and soon, but none of us knew that yet.

The people on MacDougal Street who were considered the real comers were Dave Van Ronk, and “Ramblin’” Jack Elliott, who was once an influence on Dylan and who was rapidly eclipsed by him.

That was the winter Izzy who was always ready to back new talent decided the young performer should make his Carnegie Hall debut under the sponsorship of the Folklore Center. As I recall we sold very few tickets (if any) to that event and it was probably the only time in modern history that a Bob Dylan solo appearance did not put money in the pockets of a promoter.

Great Bookmen & Bookstores: Israel (Izzy) G. Young of The Folklore Center

- By Susan Netzorg Halas

Folklore Center ad Village Voice June 1962.

I wish I’d saved some to the memorabilia from that period like the “Talking Folklore Center Blues” that Dylan wrote to commemorate the store.

‘You get a bumper and I'll get a fender
We'll go down to the Folklore Center
You get a daft and I'll get dizzy
We'll go down to see old Izzy
What did the fly say to the flea
Folklore Center is the place for me.
I'll make a pie and you'll make a salad
We'll go down to see Jack Ballard
What did the belt say to the suspender
You got to support the Folklore Center.”

I happened to be in NYC on an Antioch co-op job as a puppeteer. As it turned out I could either work the puppets or remember the lines, but could not do both. They fired me. I was young, broke and with winter coming on I went to work at the Folklore Center.

Here is an excerpt from the report I wrote for the college 50 years ago:

I was literally down to my last 25 cents when I wandered into the Folklore Center (hub of the American Folk Movement on MacDougal Street) and convinced the boss, Israel G. Young, that I was truly the person he was seeking to set his chaotic world in order. I had worked in a bookstore before. I knew bookstores like the palm of my hand. Name a facet of the business and I’d been doing it since before I learned to walk.

So he hired me: For $40 a week I worked 50+ hours. To begin with Izzy, my boss, had his own ideas about business procedure. When we got an order with a check, why he’d cash the check. Sometimes he’d send the books, you had a 50-50 chance, but if you sent the check you had a 100% chance he’d cash it. It was our most basic and consistent policy; we always cashed the checks.

I spent the first week making files. There were two files: one for bills and one for irate letters. Everything was either a bill or a letter from someone in Omaha who’d sent a check for $5 and two books about nine months ago and still hadn’t gotten his books and this was his sixth letter.

I would arrange the letters in order (we never threw anything away so all the irate letters were still there). Letter #1 one would start off a little puzzled…. perhaps the books had gone astray? But by letter #6 they’d read… “You are a cheap crook. Don’t send the books. Send me back my money.”

In my desire to square accounts I wasn’t too particular about what went out. I remember the one from a buyer in Kalamazoo who had written us a record number of fourteen letters.

Letter fifteen was anguish itself: He now had 4 copies of Pete Seeger’s Banjo Method, 3 copies of Ewan MacColl and 2 of Lead Belly, when what he really wanted was 1 Seeger Guitar Method, 1 Irish Songs of Resistance, and 1 Old English Ballads. He would however be willing to trade.

As part of my duties I was assigned the telephone. There was a long list of people for whom Izzy was NOT IN. He was most particularly NOT IN to the bank, the telephone company, the rent collector or the city marshal. If a check bounced it was a “horrible mistake” and the world was “persecuting” him. There was one week we did not bounce a single check; it was a real occasion for celebration.

Izzy ran his shop on the theory it was a club. It was there so he could see all his friends and talk to them and find out what was going on. He ran his shop so all his friends would know where to find him. He would be at the shop.

He envisioned his position as one of leader, friend, mentor and valiant fighter for Right and Justice. If you worked for him you knew that your employer was Friend of the Underdog, Seer of Future Things to Come, Prophet Without Honor in His Own Time. In short you were working for a Social Institution and it is a well known fact that Social Institutions do not have pay their bills like other people.

Great Bookmen & Bookstores: Israel (Izzy) G. Young of The Folklore Center

- By Susan Netzorg Halas

Bob Dylan – a Folklore Center discovery, circa early 1960s (photo J. Cohen).

Izzy had many thoughts about money: “It’s not fair,” he would say, “Look at me. I’m a good man. I am healthy. I am full of life. I have been in business five years. I am still poor. My mother has never given up hoping that someday I’ll change my mind and become an accountant. ‘You know, Israel,’ she’ll say, ‘there’s still time.’”

Let me describe the shop. The shop sells folklore in all shapes and forms: books, records, instruments, magazines, gossip. The retail space is about ten feet wide and sixteen feet long. There is also a back room that is about ten feet square.

The back is the most important part. The back has the best toilet on the street and people will sometimes come in for no other reasons than to use the toilet. The back has a fireplace of which Izzy is inordinately proud. We used the fireplace for burning stuff like old newspapers and cardboard boxes, but occasionally for burning stuff like circulars other people had paid us to send out. Two thousand circulars take a long time to burn and make a nice fire.

The mantle over the fireplace is covered with souvenirs and papers and other stuff so important that it can not possibly be thrown away. There are always a couple partially assembled musical instruments, an antique writing box, an attaché case, and two cans full of his special wood dye. On top of all this - wadded up in the corner - is his bedding, because at times Izzy didn’t have a place to live, so when he closed the store he just put the bedding on the floor threw some more circulars on the fire and went to sleep.

The back room is crowded even when there are no people in it. For some reason when people come into the store the back seems the most desirable of all places and that’s where they congregate. The back fills up quickly.

Invariably when there are fifteen people jammed in talking and violating the No Smoking Rule (Izzy can’t stand the smell of smoke but if you are his special friend or a girl you can smoke anyway and he will only make faces). Then, at that very moment he will decide he wants something - Right Now!

If you can’t find that something immediately the accusations will begin: “You threw it out. I told you it was important! You threw it out! It’s not fair! Why does everything happen to me?”

Great Bookmen & Bookstores: Israel (Izzy) G. Young of The Folklore Center

- By Susan Netzorg Halas

Flyer promoting Dylan's thinly attended first NYC concert at Carnegie Hall in 1961 sponsored by F.C.

Work at the Folklore Center is never accomplished like work in other places. At the Folklore Center it’s always under fire and in the face of overwhelming obstacles. Izzy will look over your shoulder while you are working until you are ready to scream, and when you do scream he will say: “I’m just trying to find out what’s going on.”

Along the right wall was the desk. The bottom drawer of the desk was exclusively reserved for letters people, mostly young girls, had written him and for his voluminous diary. The diary was written in a microscopic hand and traced his life. He filled it with entries, mostly about girls. The bottom draw was sacred: woe unto you if you misplaced something in the bottom drawer. The rest of the desk was filled with paper clips, folk music articles, pens that didn’t work and check books that didn’t have any money in them.

The walls are covered with books floor to ceiling. Rounding out the contents of the Folklore Center is the closet for Izzy’s wardrobe, an eclectic collection of Brooks Bros. meets 14^th St, the first aid kit for emergencies, the rack for hanging instruments which never works quite right, the typing table with an electric typewriter (state of the art technology in 1962). There is the red chair for guests, the brown chair for throwing stuff on and the swivel chair where I work or he sits.

And then there’s Jack, Izzy’s side kick. In my day Jack was a permanent fixture at the shop. They hold the same philosophy of work. Work is bad. Work is to be avoided. About once a month Jack and Izzy decide to build something, usually a shelf.

The process of building a shelf goes something like this: You must first spend at least one full day talking about the shelf - pro and con. Where it will go; its function and whether it is really a good idea to build with the state of the economy at an all time low.

Today they decide it is a good idea. Tomorrow they buy the lumber. When the lumber arrives they spend an hour extolling the virtue of this particular lumber and then another hour looking for the saw, hammer and nails. It’s mandatory to make a lot of noise. You could build another Egyptian pyramid faster than Jack and Izzy can build a shelf. It takes another half day to stain the shelf and then another half day to admire it.

Great Bookmen & Bookstores: Israel (Izzy) G. Young of The Folklore Center

- By Susan Netzorg Halas

Izzy circa 2010 at his Folklore Center in Stockholm, Sweden.

The best times are when the shop is empty and we three sit around with cookies and milk and talk philosophy. Philosophy covers a wide range of topics including but not limited to business, making money, why some people are better than others and women.

The subject of women is the most complicated and one that does not lend itself to summary. Suffice to say there are two categories of women – Modern Women (bad) and Real Women (good).

About once a week Izzy will announce he is in love. Sometimes he will announce it by doing a Morris Dance the length of the shop (“Look how high I can jump!”), or sometimes he will announce it by doing a Horn Dance. Sometimes he will put it in the form of a question: “Am I in Love?” and he will answer it himself: “Yes, I am in love.”

Well you get the drift. It was a unique establishment, filled with the ebb and flow of daily events and plenty of home made drama. Those happy innocent bookish days are long gone. And the rest as they say is history.

Today Dylan is a household word. Jack Ballard (Prelutsky) is a well known writer of poetry for children. Izzy sends word that he is alive and well and living in Stockholm where since the 1980s he’s run the Swedish incarnation of the Folklore Center and he still teaches contra dancing. Earlier this year he was quoted as saying, “Everyone wants to interview me, nobody wants to pay.” Some things never change.

Reach Izzy Young at:

Folklore Centrum,

Wollmar Yxkullsg 2 bv

118 50 Stockholm

Sweden

izzy.young@telia.com

08 643 46 27

------------------------

Reach Susan Netzorg Halas at wailukusue@gmail.com