Like any such store, Clinton Street tolerated a few eccentric regulars. One of these was the Beat Generation icon Herbert Huncke, who, though he was known in the forties and fifties as “the mayor of Forty-Second Street,” and ended his life living in the Chelsea Hotel, was at that time a resident of the Heights. Huncke, a major and legendary junkie, hustler, vagrant, and muse, and a minor, though vivid, writer, may or may not have been the source of the term “Beat”; he appears in lightly fictionalized form in William S. Burroughs’s Junky, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and John Clellon Holmes’s Go. He was also one of the local guides on Alfred Kinsey’s safari into the sexual underground, ushering any number of his fellow Forty-Second Street denizens to Kinsey’s Manhattan hotel room for interviews.

Huncke was still very much the squirrely ex-con and drug fiend, but he was also marvelously unthreatening, despite a certain doomy charisma. As for books, he wasn’t buying but selling, or trying to. At some point, demonstrating characteristic munificence, Allen Ginsberg had taken a carton of copies of his poetry collection Planet News, in the distinctive square, black-and-white City Lights format that Howl made famous, and autographed every copy “To Herbert, from Allen, with love.” He then gave them to Huncke to sell periodically, in order to alleviate a day’s or a week’s worth of his lifelong dire financial straits. In the bookseller’s or collector’s jargon, a copy inscribed thus, from one major Beat figure to another, was a singular and irreplaceable “association copy”: in principle, a valuable book. The fact that dozens existed was ticklish, though: that wasn’t the level of scarcity the signature implied.

Sometime before I began working at Clinton Street, the proprietor had taken one off Huncke’s hands, to offer for sale on the shop’s “autographed and first editions” shelf. It hadn’t sold. I remember the proprietor having to lecture Huncke, more than once, on why we couldn’t purchase a second: two were less valuable than one. He’d have to wait until the first sold before we’d relieve him of another. For months, Huncke’s rounds included dropping in to see whether the copy had been snapped up yet, because he so wanted to sell us a second. Giving him the bad news that it still hadn’t been, so that he couldn’t unload another, became one of my own regular duties. Huncke would be crestfallen. I think it drove him nuts, feeling he had this carton of riches to liquidate, and being denied. I’d shrug and wait for him to slouch back onto the sidewalk. I’d also been warned that when I was alone in the shop I should watch Huncke like a hawk, for fear that he’d shoplift — not fear, really, but the certainty he’d try. This wasn’t unusual in a bookshop in Brooklyn in 1983. You watched every customer like a hawk.