Antique Books

Friday, June 28, 1996 | return to: local

From the outside, it looks like the office of a hard-boiled, film-noir private eye. A weathered wooden door with a glass pane reads simply "Henry Hollander, Bookseller."

Hollander, a soft-spoken Columbia University graduate with a cascade of curly hair and a penchant for corduroy, is no Sam Spade. But if you can find his retail shop -- tucked away without a storefront, high in a downtown San Francisco office building -- Hollander will be your highbrow gumshoe, ferreting out rare and out-of-print Jewish books.

"Judaica is a tough specialty, " says Hollander, pushing up his glasses and bemoaning the scarcity of antique European haggadot and other frequently requested items.

Hollander, who set up shop downtown in July, is one of only two Bay Area booksellers who specialize in rare Jewish titles. The other is Rabbi Irvin Ungar, who has a gallery and antiques business, Historicana, in Burlingame.

On a sunny Thursday afternoon, Hollander gingerly unwraps a package that has finally arrived from a Cleveland, Ohio, book dealer.

"The Foreign Policy of Soviet Russia 1917-1918" and "How Haig Saved Lenin" may not be most people's idea of pleasurable reading. But to one of the book sleuth's customers, those rare scholarly works are worth the wait and the $75 price tag.

Hollander located the two books while using the Internet, a popular tool for book scouts today, and arranged to buy them from the Cleveland shop. In search of merchandise, he also scans garage sales, thrift stores and auctions. At the latter, he recently purchased a turn-of-the-century German volume on Jewish graveyards that was worth between $650 and $750.

While he encourages collectors to visit the downtown store in person, Hollander conducts much of his business through mail order. His catalogue is available in hard copy or online (). Titles listed in the catalogue range from "The Great Jewish Masque or the Ass in Lion's Skin, " an anti-Jewish book printed in South Africa almost 70 years ago, to "At the Wedding at the Wedding at the Wedding Jubilee, " a 1914 Yiddish songbook.