At Maxwell Street: Chicago’s Historic Marketplace Recalled in Words and Photographs

Tom Palazzolo approached me in late 2007 with the idea of turning his 1983 cinema
verité documentary, At Maxwell Street, into a book. We had just published Water Tanks of Chicago: A Vanishing Urban Legacy, by Larry W Green, and that book was striking a chord with people who had never noticed these aging wooden behemoths in their midst. Tom, like Larry, was a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In fact, I had taken Tom’s filmmaking class during the summer of 1977 at SAIC, so we had known each other for 30 years. One of Tom’s most remarkable films is called Caligari’s Cure
(http://www.facets.org/asticat?function=buyitem&catname=facets&catnum=/207), and I actually had a bit part in that movie.

Tom’s concept for the book was to approach his friends and acquaintances and get them to write about their experiences of the old Maxwell Street marketplace. He got veteran arts journalist Jack Helbig to write the introduction, and Lori Grove of the Maxwell Street Foundation, and coauthor of Chicago's Maxwell Street (IL) (Images of America) to write the foreword. The other contributors are the eminent painter Robert Guinan, the Sun-Times critic Bill Stamets, local merchant and wonderful prose stylist Lionel Bottari, poet John Platt, local artist Linda Platt, and an oral history from old-timer Leland “Sugar” Cain, Jr. A DVD of Tom’s original movie accompanies the book, along with a slide show of extra images with harmonica and guitar music, labeled Maxwell Street Blues by local musicians Little Jukela and Willie Poor Boy, recorded at Jimmy’s Woodlawn Tap in Hyde Park.

For those who are not familiar with it, Maxwell Street is an avenue that runs E/W two blocks south of Roosevelt Road (12th St) and is intersected by the Dan Ryan expressway leading into downtown Chicago. The open-air marketplace started there around the turn of the 20th century, and was active up until 2000, even though it was undergoing painful urban renewal in the last 10 years of its existence. It is now under the auspices of the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and is called University Village. The city kept moving the marketplace, and it got smaller and more insignificant with each displacement. I’m not sure exactly where it’s located now, but it was in the news this past week because the city was considering raising the vendor fees for selling at the marketplace, and people thought that would spell its ultimate demise.

The market on Maxwell Street was a unique and colorful place, where shoppers could get just about anything extremely cheaply. It was a photographer’s paradise, and this is where Tom and his wife Marcia cut their teeth as artists in the mid 1960s. The book also includes amazing photographs by Tom’s friend and fellow SAIC classmate, the painter Bernard Beckman. He has a keen interest in blues and gospel music, and there are many poignant photos in the book from Beckman of the street performers at Maxwell Street. The book as delayed because we kept adding and changing things right up to the last minute, even while the book was at press. We wanted the best book possible, and now that it’s finally published we feel like we accomplished putting together a great book.

Bob Sirott of WGN AM 720 radio called this book, “quite a nice little keepsake.” http://wgnradio.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=46757&Itemid=557 – I had a call yesterday from the painter Robert Guinan who loved the book, and lamented that there were no surviving pictures of Johnny Young, a pioneering blues artist who made Maxwell Street his main hangout, and who Guinan profiles in the book. Guinan told me he thought a book of this kind on Maxwell Street was long overdue. There are some good promotional things coming up for this book, an event at the Oak Park (IL) Public Library at 7 pm on December 18 where Tom and his wife Marcia will sign books and they will show the movie. Tom will appear on Ray Hanania’s Radio Chicagoland show WJJG AM 1530 on December 5 at 8:30 am. And, this is big, Tom will be live on WGN TV (channel 9 in Chicago, and nationally syndicated on cable TV) on the Midday News program on December 18 around 12:20 pm, where they will interview Tom about the book and show snippets from the movie.

Is the book business recession proof?

Alan Greenspan is in the news once again, his grizzled face increasingly haggard as he looks on with shock and awe at the tanking international economy. A recent cover image on the New Yorker magazine shows Wall Street traders bleeding from their eyeballs as the Angel of Death and Destruction holds up a broadsheet with the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeting straight down to Hell. There is finger pointing on both sides of the political aisle, as the fallout from irrational exuberance affects everyone. The upcoming presidential election offers two starkly different approaches to resuscitating the damaged economy, and columnist and Princeton professor Paul Krugman, this year's Nobel Memorial Prize Winner for Economics, tells us that the pain is only just beginning . . .

The book business, on the other hand, remains as quietly quirky as ever. In tough economic times, as publishers both large and small tighten their belts and rein in their advances to unknown authors who are not yet established with the reading public, one thing becomes abundantly clear: Commission reps, those feisty independent sales people who ply their trade in different territories throughout North America and beyond, offer incredibly good value for all publishers. Commission selling is fixed-cost. Commission reps pay their own expenses, including transportation, taxes, and insurance, and they only get paid when orders ship into their designated territory. Selling on commission is a time-honored practice, and if you take a look at the history of this noble profession you will see that it goes all the way back to eighteenth-century Europe as well as the North American colonies, where an intricate network of booksellers and travelers was established.

Independent reps bring more than good economics to the big table. Besides being resilient, cost effective, and an integral part of the operations of the book industry, independents can and often do freely speak their minds to good effect. This is an added value, and the self-directed rep can offer valuable advice to help publishers succeed in the marketplace. It's simple. If the publisher succeeds, the rep does, too. NAIPR reps are a talented bunch of folks, and in some cases have more than five decades of experience to draw upon. Because independent reps carry a mixed bag of publishers and go into a variety of accounts, this means they are flexible and can adapt to many situations. The durability of the relationship between publisher and independent rep counts for a lot as well: over time the rep develops into an expert on his publishers’ backlists, and the specific disciplines they publish. Booksellers rely on this breadth of knowledge in making their buying decisions. Everyone wins when you employ an independent rep.
So the answer to the question in the title of this piece is: YES! Publishers and booksellers can make good things and strong sales happen with a little help from their friends at NAIPR.