On a sunny Thursday afternoon in May, Enrico Adelman is sitting outside Zabar’s next to a table piled with Philip Roth novels — all of them, he tells the mostly indifferent passersby, signed. Adelman, 72, used to have a store, Bloomsday Books, on this block, but only the stand remains. He met Roth, who died a year ago, in May 1989 —“I can’t forget the date because it was Mother’s Day.†Roth and Claire Bloom, whom the author married the following year, stopped to look at a copy of Simon Schama’s Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution. (Adelman remembers Roth asking her, “Do you want it, Mother? I’ll buy it for you.â€) Adelman, starstruck, introduced himself. He and Roth became friends — “We’d have lunch together at Barney Greengrass, which he loved. He used to like the omelet with onions and lox†— and Roth agreed to sign copies of his books. Hundreds and hundreds of them over time. “When The Plot Against America came out, I knew that was going to be a big book, so I ordered a thousand copies,†Adelman says. Roth was in Connecticut, so Adelman rented a van, drove the books up to him for a marathon signing session, and stayed overnight. Today, Adelman still has “probably a thousand or more†copies of signed Roth novels, which he sells mostly through Amazon. Not so many at the stand — around 4 p.m., Adelman makes today’s only sale: A Collegiate School senior named Sebastian Chaves buys a copy of Goodbye, Columbus. “I just recently read American Pastoral,†he says. “I thought it was really good.†He takes a picture of the stand with his phone before leaving.
*A version of this article appears in the May 27, 2019, issue of New York Magazine. Subscribe Now!