Robert B. Cohen, who built the Hudson County News Company from a small newspaper distribution company in northern New Jersey into Hudson News, the international airport, train and bus station newsstand and bookstore operator, died last Wednesday. He was 86.
The newsstand business started in the 1970s, when a newsstand Hudson supplied in Newark Airport went bankrupt and the Port Authority invited Cohen to take over the concession.
The first Hudson News kiosk opened at LaGuardia Airport and marked a change from the usual airport newsstands: they had a broad selection, were airy and displayed the entire covers of magazines.
Cohen's son James told the Associated Press (via the Wall Street Journal) that "instead of just a few dozen titles, because we were the distributor, we put up hundreds. We gave people a selection that they would not find anywhere else, titles even from foreign countries, from all over the world. It was all based on the not-so-scientific fact that people really like to read stuff when they go on a plane."
Hudson News has nearly 600 locations in the U.S. and some other countries. Hudson Booksellers, which took over some old Borders airport stores, has 66 stores.
Hudson News is now owned by Dufry, which operates duty-free shops around the world.
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Una Mulzac, who owned Liberation Bookstore in Harlem in New York City for more than 40 years, died on January 21. She was 88.
The New York Times had a long obituary, noting that Liberation Bookstore was a fixture in the community. "Her bookstore, born at a time when Harlem was ravaged by crime and heroin, became a neighborhood landmark like the Apollo or Sylvia's restaurant and endured into the era of Starbucks and Old Navy. People came from all over Harlem and beyond to buy books there, whether by well-known authors like James Baldwin and Toni Morrison or by little-known conspiracy theorists."
Mulzac, the Times said, "seldom left the store during business hours except to protest war, racism and police brutality. Occasionally, she was arrested." By 2007, Mulzac's health and the state of the store had declined enough for her family to close the store, whose inventory they donated to Hue-Man Bookstore & Café.
The Times said that Mulzac's "driving ambition was to emulate her father, Hugh N. Mulzac, the first black person to command a ship in the United States merchant marine and a socialist whose political beliefs were investigated in 1960 by the House Committee on Un-American Activities."