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| Henry Berliner (photo: Joseph Szalay) |
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Longtime bookseller Henry Berliner died last Wednesday at age 73.
Berliner was the owner for many years of the Foundry Bookstore, New Haven, Conn., which opened in 1974 and closed in 2003. In an interview with Bookselling This Week after he shut the store, Berliner, who started at the Foundry as a clerk in 1975, said that the store hit its peak in 1993, but then competitive pressures from "bookstore chains, supermarkets, price clubs, and the Internet" affected sales.
The Foundry was a 1,200-square-foot, general-interest store near the Yale University campus. Still, as Berliner, put it, the Foundry was not a college bookstore. "The undergraduates usually go to other bookstores," he said. "Our customers are faculty and graduate students.... We're more of a community bookstore."
He added: "For years we got by on word of mouth. That doesn't work as well anymore. It's been 29 years, and it's enough. We were a very good bookstore."
Berliner was beloved by fellow booksellers and reps in New England. As Brian Heller wrote concerning his days as a Penguin rep, "I would always make him my first appointment of the season because I learned a lot about my list from him. I received innumerable great book recommendations from him, too. He kept in touch with me for decades (often to ask for a book, but just as often just to complain about the Mets)."
Larry Dorfman, author and sales manager at Apollo Publishers, remembered what made Berliner special: "His knowledge of books that was vast, the ease with which he smiled, his gentility, and that when you left his presence, you always felt better about the world."