Four Continent Book Corporation

Four Continent Book Corporation was a New York bookstore specializing in Russian-language materials.

History

The store originated as the Bookniga Corporation, at 255 Fifth Avenue,[1] and later moved to 199 Fifth Avenue.[2] The business was founded in 1935 to sell Soviet books in the United States.[3] In 1939, three booksellers from the Bookniga Corporation, Raphael Rush, Norman Weinberg, and Morris Liskin, were prosecuted under the Foreign Agents Registration Act for failing to register as agents of the Soviet company Mezhdunarodnaya Kniga.[4] They were accused of selling materials "of a political and propagandist nature, and for political and propaganda purposes"[5] By 1941, Bookniga had changed its name to the Four Continent Book Corporation, though it retained its same staff and building.[6] The store's first president, B. Nikolsky, was replaced by Cyril J. Lamkin,[7] who later moved to Moscow.[8] Allan Markoff, brother of Abraham Markoff became the store's president in 1948.[9]

The business' final president was Eda I. Glaser, a former employee at the United Nations. In May 1953, Glaser was fired from her $4,000 a year library clerk job by Dag Hammarskjöld, after she refused to answer questions about her political beliefs posed by loyalty investigators.[10] Glaser's case, one of eleven fired UN employees, was appealed to the UN Administrative Tribunal who ordered that she receive compensation for her termination but Hammarskjöld refused to reinstate the former employees.[11]

In 1955, the store was one of four businesses targeted by the FBI in an investigation of Soviet propaganda in the United States.[12] The store's owners stated that the value of books they imported between 1946 and 1960 was one million dollars.[13] The bookstore was bombed multiple times because of its politics and association with the Soviet Union. In 1976, a pipe bomb exploded in the store, placed by the Jewish Armed Resistance Strike Unit in retaliation for the Soviet Union's treatment of its Jewish population.[14] The store was also the target of another small bomb attack in 1981, which was attributed to a member of the Jewish Defense League who demanded the release of Natan Sharansky.[15]

As president, Glaser specialized in early Soviet imprints.[16] She and the store were the subject of negative news stories in 1979, when employees at Four Continent went on strike.[2] Press coverage of the strike attempted to portray Glaser as hypocritical for being unable to support the store's workers while selling Marxist literature. Glaser retired from Four Continent and worked as a volunteer for the New York Public Library.[17] Another strike was held in 1983, after the store dismissed its 20 employees and decided to operate through the mail.[18] That same year, the business was purchased by the Viktor Kamkin Bookstore.[19] Kamkin operated the store until 2000, when he closed the New York location.[20]

References

1. "U.S. Indicts Soviet Book Firm Under Propaganda Act". St. Louis Post-Dispatch. December 16, 1939. pp. 5A.
2. Richman, Alan (1979-05-24). "Dissident Words at Russian Bookstore". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2024-07-16.
3. Fine, Sidney (1984). Frank Murphy. 3: The Washington years. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. p. 120. ISBN 978-0-472-10046-0.
4. Gary, Brett (1999). The nervous liberals: propaganda anxieties from World War I to the Cold War. Columbia studies in contemporary American history. New York: Columbia university press. p. 212. ISBN 978-0-231-11364-9.
5. "Three to Face U.S. Trial As Red Agents". The Salt Lake Tribune. December 17, 1939. p. 1.
6. Stokes, Dillard (June 10, 1941). "Court Told of Moscow's Propaganda Network". The Washington Post. p. 16.
7. Riesel, Victor (April 6, 1940). "Heard on the Left". The New Leader. p. 8.
8. "'Reds Infilitrate Many Newspapers'". St. Albans Daily Messenger. May 9, 1954. p. 6.
9. Communist Propaganda Activities in the U.S.: Hearings Before the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, Eighty-second Congress, First Session. Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. 1951. p. 126.
10. "Hammarskjold Fires U.S. Employee". Los Angeles Evening Citizen News. May 21, 1953. p. 23.
11. "U.N.Head Won't Rehire Ousted Quartet". The Boston Globe. September 3, 1953. p. 3.
12. Allen, Robert S. (July 6, 1955). "Red Outlets in U.S.: FBI Making Special Inquiry". Norfolk Daily News. p. 12.
13. Barnhisel, Greg; Turner, Catherine, eds. (2010). Pressing the fight: print, propaganda, and the Cold War. Studies in print culture and the history of the book. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. p. 151. ISBN 978-1-55849-736-8. OCLC 368048049.
14. "Five Bombs Exploded Before Solidarity Rally". The Wisconsin Jewish Chronicles. May 13, 1976. p. 3.
15. Mickolus, Edward F.; Sandler, Todd; Murdock, Jean M. (1989). International terrorism in the 1980s: a chronology of events. Ames: Iowa State University Press. p. 196. ISBN 978-0-8138-0024-0.
16. Kasinec, Edward (2006). "Russian Imperial and Elite Provenance Books: Their Afterlife in Post World War II New York". Solanus. 20: 38.
17. Davis, Robert H. (2001). "History of Slavic and East European Collections in the United States During the Interwar Period: An Agenda for Research". Solanus. 15: 45.
18. Riesel, Victor (June 15, 1983). "Soviets Harsh on Employees". Indiana Gazette. p. 12.
19. "In Memoriam: Eda Isaakovna Glaser (-2003)". Association of College and Research Libraries: Slavic and East European Section Newsletter. 20: 83. 2004. ISSN 2150-6701.
20. Hellie, Richard (2002). "Working for the Soviets: Chicago, 1959-61, Mezhkniga, and the Soviet Book Industry". Russian History. 29 (2–4): 542. doi:10.1163/187633102x00153. ISSN 0094-288X.

External links

• FBI file on Eda Glaser and the Four Continent Book Corp.