NEW YORK, NY.- Ben McFall, the longest-tenured bookseller in the history of the Strand, New York’s renowned bookstore, who for decades peered above his spectacles at a line of acolytes, tourists and young colleagues for whom he incarnated the store’s erudite but easygoing spirit, died Dec. 22 at his home in Jersey City, New Jersey. He was 73.
Jim Behrle, his partner, said the cause was a fall. He added that McFall had pulmonary fibrosis, which had recently rendered him nearly bedridden.
McFall enjoyed duties and perks not given to any other Strand employee. For much of his tenure, he was the only person in charge of an entire section. Not only that, the fief he governed — the fiction shelves — provides the Strand with the core of its business in used books.
He determined the price of each used hardcover novel and book of stories and then affixed a Strand sticker to the dust jacket. On occasion, he’d assess a book newly purchased by the store and find inside his own handwriting with a price from the 1980s.
Pricing was one of many fields in which McFall’s experience enabled him to make quick, intuitive pronouncements. Without checking a computer, he would say he knew how many years it had been since he had last seen an obscure old novel, the number of days it had remained in stock and its current value online.
His style of authority was offhand. He was rarely seen reading for pleasure, although he appeared to have studied most novels anyone had heard of. Surveying his mental map of the fiction shelves, he could name the books there, and cite the number of copies of them, at any given moment.
“It seems like a feat, but if it were your house, you’d know where things are, too,” McFall told The New York Times for a 2013 profile.
Yet he did not trade this adroitness for a position in management. Instead, he remained among shoppers and Strand underlings on the ground floor, where he became the only employee to have a desk designated specifically for his use. It was at the back of the main aisle, the sort of placement a restaurateur might choose for the corner table he would occupy in his own establishment. Behind McFall lay a sign reading “Classics” and a shelf of leather-bound volumes.
In phone interviews, three people — Lisa Lucas, publisher of Pantheon Books; writer Lucy Sante, a onetime Strand colleague of McFall’s; and Nancy Bass Wyden, the Strand’s owner — all referred unprompted to the reliability with which, when visiting McFall, they’d encounter a line of other people hoping to speak to him.
Behrle, who also once worked at the Strand, said he would approach the line and ask if anyone needed help.
“People would decline,” he said. “They waited for Ben.”
Lucas made a habit of heading to the Union Square area of Manhattan to visit the Strand and chat with McFall every Saturday she was in town.
“He’d always be sifting through a pile of used books,” she said. “A Barthelme book, a DeLillo book, Colson Whitehead, Murakami — we’d have conversations about whatever he had in his hands.”
McFall could gossip or banter without looking up from the books he was working through. He sometimes surprised people by halting a conversation, departing wordlessly and returning with a book that he would say his interlocutor had to read. He was known to stash books under his desk if he thought they were perfectly suited to any of his regular customers.
McFall will not have a successor as hegemon of fiction; his duties, like most others at the Strand, will be shared.
“Ben never had an official position,” said Paul Secor, a retired Strand book buyer who was McFall’s colleague for most of his tenure. “Ben’s title was ‘Ben.’”
The prospect of the Strand without McFall is “ungrounding,” Wyden said. “He’s the heart of the Strand”
Benjamin Julius McFall was born June 7, 1948, in Detroit, and grew up there. His parents, Lester and Joetta (Reddick) McFall, were schoolteachers.
He graduated from Olivet College in Michigan with a bachelor’s degree in French and music in 1971. He moved with college friends to Connecticut and worked at the Remarkable Book Shop in Westport. A co-worker told McFall she could see him at the Strand. He had never heard of the place, but in 1978 he arrived in New York and interviewed for a job. Fred Bass, the store’s owner at the time, hired him on the spot.
In that era, the Strand grubstaked downtown bohemia. In addition to Sante, figures like Patti Smith and Tom Verlaine, frontman of the band Television, worked as clerks, earning enough to rent crummy apartments, buy records and go to nightclubs. McFall contributed to an issue of Stranded, Sante’s zine, that also included a collage by Jean-Michel Basquiat and work by writers who would go on to prominence, like Kathy Acker and Darryl Pinckney.
Back then, the Strand hardly sold new books. Now, in addition to the latest bestsellers, it gives space to socks, tote bags and mugs. Bibliophilic employees have complained about that evolution while also accusing management of mistreating workers, particularly during the pandemic, which led to mass layoffs and a warning from Wyden that “our business is unsustainable.”
McFall gave his blessing to commercialization — “I’m perfectly willing to sell low-end dresses here if it means keeping the Strand in business,” he told the Times — and throughout his tenure he commanded respect from management and across factions of the rank and file.
He became particularly close to the shifting cast of young intellectual types who rely on the Strand for their first job. When a junior colleague once asked him, “Ben, where have you been all my life?” he answered honestly, “I’ve been right here.”
A few years ago, Troy Schipdam, a Strand employee in his mid-20s, was startled to see McFall receive a visit at the store from a man Schipdam recognized as Matthew Shipp, whom he considers among the world’s greatest living jazz pianists.
Schipdam asked McFall how he knew Shipp. The two were old friends, of course — Shipp had worked at the Strand decades ago. McFall brought Schipdam to one of Shipp’s shows, gave him the lowdown on arts figures in the audience and took his new protégé backstage to hang out with Shipp and his sidemen.
When McFall was interviewed for his Times profile, he gestured toward a group of young Strand staffers and said, “I don’t have to have children because these are my children.”
Aside from Behrle, McFall leaves no immediate survivors. A man Behrle described as the love of McFall’s life, Tim Pollock, died of AIDS in 1985. His ashes, which McFall kept, will be buried alongside McFall’s ashes in Detroit.
As he grew sicker, McFall insisted on continuing to work. He spent about half his paycheck on Ubers that would pick him up at his door in Jersey City and drop him off as close as possible to the Strand’s entrance. Because of his illness, he had to stop to catch his breath every 15 feet.
For the sake of his safety during the pandemic, McFall was moved to corporate offices away from the public and his usual spot on the ground floor. There was no more line of fans. Yet McFall, who was so attached to his Strand nametag that he sometimes wore it around his apartment, chose to keep it on even though he no longer spoke to customers.
It read: “Benjamin. Ask me.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
