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| Bill Savran | |
Bookseller Bill Savran, whose Savran's Paperback Shop "was the place to be in Minneapolis" at the height of the countercultural movement, died September 20, the Star Tribune reported. He was 84. The bookstore opened in 1965 and was decorated to suit the owner's "eccentric style, installing vintage cash registers, hanging rice paper lamps from the ceiling and designing his own window displays. The book selection was just as eclectic.... Over time, Savran's became a hub for the intellectual and cultural community in Minneapolis."
For more than 20 years, the bookstore "was nestled in the corner of a building on Cedar Avenue and opened in the 1960s as the West Bank was becoming the hip off-campus neighborhood in the city. College students, hippies, beatniks, writers and scholars would walk to Savran's to pick up a book, listen to a reading or simply chat," the Star Tribune wrote.
Noting that Bill Savran and Bob Dylan were part of the same fraternity at the University of Minnesota, Laurie Savran, his first wife, added that in the army he served in the same platoon as Elvis Presley and that his bookstore was visited by cultural icons like Patti Smith and Annie Leibovitz.
"The bookstore ran like a family. People came through the door and were treated like family. And that couldn't have happened without Bill," said Marly Rusoff, the literary agent who began her career as a Savran's employee. "I was struggling to find out what I could do in life, and by giving me a job in a bookstore, it was a great clarifying moment. What could I do that was better than this?"
Russoff and Savran later opened another bookshop in Dinkytown, where she "and her writer friends would host readings, events and parties in the apartment above that store, a literary community that later incorporated as the Loft," the Star Tribune noted. When Savran's Paperback Shop closed in 1987, he "started a handyman business, A Real Mensch Repairs, and worked at Magers & Quinn Booksellers in Uptown. He wrote short stories, anecdotes about the people he met, and little poems about the sights and sounds around him. He read constantly."