Colwyn Samuel Krussman, former bookseller and rep and co-founder of the Parson Weems' Publisher Services commission rep group, died on Saturday, November 26.
For years, he and his wife, Marilyn Krussman, owned the Greenwood Bookshop in downtown Wilmington, Del. He also was general manager of Chester County Book Company, college sales manager for Oxford University Press and a part-time Oxford rep in the mid-Atlantic states. In 1997, he and Chris Kerr founded Parson Weems.
As Kerr remembered, the group started "with one client and the encouragement of our long-suffering wives. We named the company after Mason Locke Weems, a freelance book sales representative in the late 18th/early 19th century, who is better remembered for his invented biography of George Washington. It seemed appropriate because Sam had taught history at the University of Minnesota and Temple University; he was an early Modern German History scholar. He spoke and read German which he had acquired during a two year Fulbright Scholar fellowship in Germany."
Kerr also remembered first calling on Krussman in 1977 at the Greenwood Bookshop: "I was then a sales rep for a small press distributor. Sam was cordial but forbidding. He instructed me to sit at an empty desk in the basement and be quiet while he reviewed my list. He marked up the catalog, passed it to me, and suggested that I be happy with the order. I was and departed."
A funeral is scheduled for 11 a.m. on Saturday, December 3, at Old Swedes Church, 606 N. Church St., Wilmington, Del.; a reception follows.
