Category: Commentary/Editorial, Local Businesses || By

Over the holiday break, I finally made it to Book Country's new outlet store at the former Potter-McCune warehouse on Walnut Street. I'm a book addict, so I feel like I need some sort of excuse for why it took so long to get there.

(John Belushi in The Blues Brothers, pleading with Carrie Fisher: "I ran out of gas. I had a flat tire. There was an earthquake. A flood! Locusts! It wasn't my fault!")

Capsule review: It's well worth a visit if you live in the area. Driving in? Hmm. Not sure. Let me explain.

The prices are very good. I didn't see anything more than about $7, including the compendium of New Yorker magazine cartoons (with DVD) that came out several years ago at a list price of $35.

Most of the books are recent (2007 and 2008) best-sellers, including some big titles, so if you wanted to read something that's come out in the last 18 months and didn't want to pay full-price, check out Book Country first. (This is not the same Book Country that had a mildewed store full of 10- and 15-year-old books at Eastland Mall. Yes, same company, but completely different management.)

And there seems to be a decent selection of evergreen titles (Agatha Christie mysteries, for instance) and a nice assortment of fiction and non-fiction from African-American writers. Service is good and parking is a snap; they have free coffee and tea and accept checks and major credit cards.

But they seem a little bit "overshelved," as they say in the retail business. Too few books are spread out over too many square feet, which gives the store an empty appearance. My experience suggests people expect book stores to be a little bit crowded.

. . .

Book Country says that they have thousands of titles available in the warehouse, and they can look any of them up in a computer and retrieve them in a few minutes. That's fine if you know what you want before you get there, but part of the fun of shopping in an outlet store is finding stuff you didn't know you wanted.

(I found a 2007 book, for instance, called Conquering Gotham about the construction of Pennsylvania Station in New York. I didn't know it existed, and wouldn't have thought to ask. Book Country had it for $4.20, brand new, in hardcover. Amazon.com wants $21.)

There's also an old retail maxim that "you can't sell from an empty wagon." Simply having the stuff piled up in front of the shopper serves as an enticement to buy.

Bottom line: Richard and Sandy Roberts of Book Country deserve major props for opening a new retail store in the city and in a very tough economic climate. If you read, it also deserves your support; with a few tweaks (mainly bringing some of the stock out of the warehouse) it could and should thrive.

. . .

With My Little Eye: One of my purchases during the recent Book Country outing was a history of the late, lamented Spy magazine called Spy: The Funny Years. I started to page through it in the store, wound up reading part of it as I stood in the aisle, and then bought it and read it cover-to-cover in two long sittings.

It's hard to describe Spy, which thrived from the late 1980s until roughly 1991 or 1992. I can remember discovering it in the supermarket when I was 13 or 14 --- too old for Mad and not old, boring or pretentious enough for the New Yorker (I'm still not two out of the three). I was stunned that they were allowed to sell something like it at Scozio's in McKeesport.

Spy was snotty and disrespectful to people in power (and these were the Reagan years, after all), dismissive of wealthy Wall Street tycoons during the height of the "greed-is-good" era (it mocked Donald Trump and Ivan Boesky long before their disgrace) and loved to pull down the pants of Hollywood's best and brightest (Spy took on people like Bill Cosby and Arnold Schwarznegger when they were major stars).

Even if I didn't care about many of the people Spy went after (how many teen-age nerds from McKeesport knew who Mike Ovitz was?) I could appreciate that Spy spoke truth to power.

Yes, there was an annoying Ivy League preciousness to Spy --- swanky New York cocktail parties were the center of the universe, Spy's writers were the smartest kids in the room, and people who lived in places like Dayton and Minneapolis and (by God) McKeesport were amusing bumpkins --- but there was also fearlessness.

. . .

And Spy worked crazy hard: Its articles were meticulously reported. It was the first (and as far as I know, only) publication to expose Bohemian Grove, the notorious secretive California resort for conservative politicians and industrialists, and I can still remember its takedown of Wackenhut, a private security company who critics alleged had engaged in covert U.S. intelligence operations years before anyone heard of Blackwater.

I honestly hadn't thought about Spy in about 15 years. (The magazine closed in 1994, was revived, and finally went toes-up in 1998.) I threw out my copies in one of my moves after college, so reading Spy: The Funny Years was like reuniting with a long, lost (somewhat annoying) friend.

A few reviews on the Internet suggest that Spy is now a hopelessly dated artifact of the 1980s, like Jams or K-cars. Yes, many of the subjects that Spy covered breathlessly (Ivana Trump, anyone?) are now trivia questions at best, but what stunned me was how fresh the magazine still looks, and how vibrant the writing remains.

Websites like Wonkette have captured some of the tone of Spy, but they don't do the digging, they're snotty without being smart, and they just don't look as good. In fact, I can't think of a single magazine or website that combines that quality of reporting and attitude.

. . .

Perhaps the most surprising thing I learned about Spy from the book was about Spy's movie reviewer, Walter Monheit.

Monheit was a spoof of movie critics like Peter Travers*, who seem to exist only so that studios can quote their reviews in advertisements.

Rather than write entire reviews, however, Monheit (who was depicted wearing a beret, monocle and ascot, holding a cigarette in a long holder) just wrote nothing but quotes for movie advertisements.

In Monheit's "Blurb-O-Mat!" column, every single movie got four stars or more (he actually used monocles instead of stars), was "Oscar-bait," and merited a "clever" punny adjective (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was "terra-pin-riffic!").

It turns out Monheit was (is?) a real person. Monheit fled from the Nazis in his native Austria, barely escaping the concentration camps. (His father was murdered by the Nazis; the Monheits are Jewish.) In his semi-retirement he became a man-about-town who got his kicks hanging out at celebrity parties while working part-time as Spy's courier.

The magazine's editors talked Mr. Monheit into lending his name and likeness to the movie review column, which (according to the book) he rarely read: "Who has time to read everything?" he supposedly said.

If Walter Monheit was a real person, then maybe Gene Shalit is, too. The mind reels.

. . .

P.S.: Canadian writer Joe Clark (not the former prime minister) maintains an archive of Spy clippings and reviews old issues at his website. It's worth a visit.

* --- Correction, Not Perfection: I originally lumped Joel Siegel in with Peter Travers. It turns out that Joel Siegel took a turn for the worse more than a year ago. Mea culpa, and my sympathies to the Siegel family, should they happen to read this.

In my defense, even his obituary notes that "as Mr. Siegel was prone to hyperbole, quotes from his reviews were routinely featured in newspaper ads and on placards outside Broadway theaters."