Obituary Note: Burt Britton

Burt Britton, a bookseller at Manhattan's the Strand bookstore in the 1970s who "went on to become a partner in another bookstore and was a collector of celebrity self-portraits, along with a mass of books of his own," died July 21, the New York Times reported. He was 84. Britton "was capable of endlessly 'discoursing, more or less simultaneously, on every book in the place,' as the critic Anatole Broyard wrote in 1976. For years before he was hired, Mr. Britton had spent his days there as a customer, browsing and reading.... He was also the kind of idiosyncratic New York personality who was not a household name but influenced the influential."

At the Strand, Britton "told well-known customers (and everyone else) what they ought to be reading. It helped that he had an encyclopedic memory and always seemed to know what pile a sought-after book was in, even if it was on the bottom," the Times noted.

"There is no doubt in my mind that I am the greatest reader alive," he once declared, "at least in fiction."

Ironically, Britton had not been much of a reader until, as an adult, he happened to pick up a copy of William Faulkner's The Hamlet. "I read 30 pages and said, 'My God!' " he recalled. The experience changed his life: "I drove a cab and bartended nights so I could live in bookstores."

He became a regular at the Strand and, as he later noted: "Finally Ben Bass and his son, Fred, who are the owners, said to me, 'Why don't you come to work for us? You spend all your time here anyhow.' 'So I did." Ten years later, in 1978, he left to start Books & Company with Jeannette Watson on Madison Avenue at East 74th Street, although he left the business after a year.

Britton was also the author of Self-Portrait: Book People Picture Themselves, featuring more than 500 sketches he had collected from well-known writers, artists and musicians.

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