Jay Dantry thought he was going to be the next Great American Playwright when he was an undergraduate at Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon) and the University of Pittsburgh.
"I found," he says in his typically wry manner, "that I had nothing to say."
Dantry knew he wanted to do something connected with books. Reading had been a passion since childhood, one that had sustained him during four years in the Air Force. When a small bookshop became available on Fifth Avenue in Oakland in 1955 – the owner was leery of the University of Pittsburgh opening a bookstore on the same street – Dantry jumped at the chance to buy it.
Jay's Book Stall became one of Pittsburgh's most unique and beloved literary institutions. For 52 years, writers have dropped by the cozy Oakland landmark – not so much to tout their latest book as to pay homage to Dantry's passion for their work. Under glass on the front counter, and posted throughout the store, are photographs of the bookseller with literary lions past and present. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., John Updike, Stephen King, Erica Jong, Wendy Wasserstein and Allen Ginsberg visited Dantry's emporium. Michael Chabon, the Pulitzer Prize winning author and Pitt grad, worked there. Actors David Conrad and Patrick Wilson were regulars. Dr. Thomas Starzl and the late Fred Rogers asked Dantry for his counsel on their writing projects.
Soon Dantry will sell his last book. His lease is up; it is time. At 79, he is still intellectually nimble. But physically, he knows that he cannot traverse the steps from the basement to the main floor quite as quickly – "I should have put in an escalator," he says.
Regrets? Dantry has a few.
"Not smiling enough," he says, "and also becoming a curmudgeon at three o'clock in the afternoon. I feel like I should put my head down like I used to do in school."
More notable are his brilliant memories. Composer Ned Rorem was the first notable celebrity to stop at the Book Stall. Others would quickly follow, and often there were playful anecdotes attached to their visits. Vonnegut admired a tie Dantry wore; naturally, he left the store with it. Doris Lessing, while posing for a picture, squeezed his knee, causing him to yelp. But the only time Dantry was starstruck was when Mary Higgins Clark asked him to accompany her to a book convention dinner in Chicago.
"I had to force myself to go," he says.
And there was Chabon, who begged for a job.
"His father was a great customer of mine, as was his stepmother," Dantry says. "He came in asking for a job, but we didn't have anything. One day he came in and said if we didn't hire him, he'd commit suicide. I think it was a ploy."
Chabon says Dantry gave him with the rarest of gifts: He took a young college student's passion seriously.
"He used to tease me about a lot of things" Chabon says. "My clothes, my hair, my friends, the circles under my eyes, but he never teased me about my crappy little short stories and poems. He really seemed to think I was going to be a writer when I grew up."
So Jay's Book Stall will come to an end, just as it opened: quietly. There will be no sales, no "Going Out of Business" banners. One day, the shelves will be emptied, the door will be locked.
The city will be lesser for it, but Dantry's legacy will endure.
"I don't know if there are three rivers of literary culture flowing through Pittsburgh – I wouldn't be sure how to count them – but I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that Jay is one of those rivers," Chabon says. "He has been a steady, strong, tireless force for good, championing books and authors he cared about, and because of his hospitality, his store has long served as a nexus for people in all the arts to come together and hang out and get to know each other.
"He has proved all kinds of points about the power and the value and the endurance of books and writing," Chabon says, "simply by virtue of staying open all these years."
