A bookseller of few words

I read in the paper that, at the precocious age of 95, Harold Herman has died. From 1964 to 1983, as proprietor of the Whitman Book Shop and later Penn Center Books, Mr. H - as everyone called him - was Center City's premier bookseller.

Mr. H was a man of few words, most of them names. During the half-century I knew him, he always addressed me by my last name. In fact, we had entire conversations that consisted of one word: "Lidz." Yet somehow he managed to say it with great affection.

I was 9 when my family moved from New York to the Philadelphia suburbs, where Mr. H's second son was one of my classmates at Belmont Hills Elementary. As a kid, I loved to sit at the Hermans' kitchen table while Mr. H slowly enunciated the remarkable names of unremarkable ballplayers: "DOO-ley WO-mack." "JOHN-ny HERRN-stein." "COOK-ie RO-jas."

One of the last times I saw him, we free-associated sports names with medications advertised on the Golf Channel: Boniva. Bonilla. Zyprexa. Teixeira. Cymbalta. Peralta. Ask your doctor if prescription Palestra is right for you.

I had known Mr. H for four years before he uttered a word to me. He was a gruff, intimidating presence back in the '60s, and perhaps the only Jewish Republican in the Philly suburbs. He also may have been the first Philadelphia Jew to dab margarine on his bagels instead of cream cheese. And when every other Jew on the Main Line switched to Nova lox in the '70s, he had the courage to stick with belly. That's the stuff Mr. H was made of.

Indeed, he may have been Philly's first foodie. In his case, though, taste took a backseat to color. "Pass the blue," he'd tell his wife, Flossie, pointing to a bottle of salad dressing. Or, "Flossie, you know I don't eat green Jell-O!" Actually, that would have been one of Mr. H's longer dinner conversations. Over the course of one hour-long meal I attended at the Herman home in 1967, Mr. H muttered exactly three words from behind a copy of the Philadelphia Bulletin: "Salt." "Pepper." And "Floss!"

With the exception of my parents, Mr. and Mrs. H were the only married couple of my youth who, in their own sublimely daffy way, actually seemed to enjoy spending time with one another.

When my mother's cancer started to spread and she was spending more time in the hospital than out, I became a near-constant presence at the Herman house. A few months after my bar mitzvah, I was playing touch football in their backyard on what turned out to be the worst day of my life. I still remember Flossie waving me into the house. "Your father is coming to pick you up," she said. I knew then that my mother was dead, because Flossie didn't say another word to me.

I went out front, stood on the curb, and watched for my father's old Chevy, hoping it would never come. When it did, he waited until I got in before saying, "Your mother died this morning." He said nothing else during the short drive home. I looked at him surreptitiously, but he looked straight ahead. I couldn't speak, and he couldn't speak. Our love for my mother had made us dumb.

At the funeral a couple of days later, Mr. H shuffled over to me, put a hand on my shoulder, and murmured, with grim finality, "Lidz." That was all he said, and all he needed to say.

For my bar mitzvah, Mr. and Mrs. H had given me a dictionary, Webster's Third International. It's the only bar mitzvah gift I still have. I like to think Harold and Flossie were the first people to envision a future for me as a writer. I still recall Mr. H's instructions: After looking something up, leave the dictionary open to M. He explained, tersely, that leaving the book open to any other letter would ruin the spine. The other morning, I checked. Fittingly, it was open to the page that begins with the word maraschino, the kind of bottled cherry that always reposed on the top shelf of the Hermans' refrigerator.

The only wedding present my wife and I still have is a copy of Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler that Floss and Harold gave us. The novel, which remains one of my favorites, has a character named Irnerio who doesn't read. "They teach us to read as children," he says, "and for the rest of our lives we remain the slaves of all the written stuff they fling in front of us. I may have had to make some effort myself, at first, to learn not to read, but now it comes quite naturally to me. The secret is not refusing to look at the written words. On the contrary, you must look at them, intensely, until they disappear."

In all the years Mr. H ran Whitman and Penn Center, I never saw him read a book. Which reminds me of something my mother used to say: that the most important lessons lay not in what you need to learn, but in what you first need to unlearn. My mother - and Floss and Harold - showed me that the difficulty is not in new ideas, but in escaping the old ones that ramify into the corners of our minds. The philosopher Lao Tzu - whose name Mr. H no doubt would have loved to turn over on his tongue - once divined, "To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, subtract things."

Somewhere in the coiled scrolls of the Talmud is an adage that says you are not required to finish, but you are not allowed to stop, either. The critic Judith Shulevitz observed that life, unlike fiction, has neither crisp beginnings nor redemptive endings. It endures, as Mr. H did, until it doesn't.

If there is an afterlife, his passing makes it seem much more attractive. It will be a kick to hear him slowly enunciating: "Jer-e-MI-ah." "I-SAI-ah." "E-ZE-ki-el."