Walter Goldwater

Walter Goldwater (July 29, 1907 – June 24, 1985) was an American antiquarian bookseller, who worked briefly at International Publishers before founding University Place Book Shop in Manhattan, part of "Book Row". He was also a co-founder and publisher of Dissent magazine and a noted tournament chess player.

Background

Walter Goldwater was born on July 29, 1907, in Harlem, New York. His father, Dr. Abraham Goldwater, was a radical and knew prominent black activists including W. E. B. DuBois. In 1927, after starting college at the City College of New York, Goldwater graduated from the University of Michigan. The bookstore specialized in African, African-American, and Caribbean (West Indies) literature as well as used, old, and rare books. Others whom Chambers tried to recruit in the same period included: Herbert Solow, David Zabladowsky, Diana Trilling, and Robert Cantwell.

Goldwater purchased an estimated ten thousand "little magazines" (e.g., Bibelot, Black Cat, Yellow Book, and Philistine) from nearby Pratt bookshop. Over time, he sold these to universities, including Yale University and the University of Connecticut.

He had been a Socialist Workers Party and Workers Party member at some point before 1967. In 1950, Goldwater published a new edition of W. E. B. DuBois's Black Reconstruction. He published the magazine for 15 years.

Legacy

In his will, Goldwater left University Place Book Shop to long-time employee William French, who ran the shop from 1985 to 1988. (2nd edn. covers 321 journals ) "New York City Bookshops in the 1930s and 1940s: The Recollections of Walter Goldwater", Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook (1993)