Robert Nedelkoff

Jack B. Tenney (1891–1970) Jack Tenney, the man who led the California legislature’s famous red-hunting committee, began his career, ironically, as a lawyer whose politics veered from progressive to socialist. Since his views precluded his doing much work with the more ...

I. Back when I lived in California, I used to travel to Orange County to shop for secondhand books. I followed the same routine each time I went. First, I would drive to the Book Baron at Ball and Magnolia Boulevard in Anaheim, home to about a million volumes. Then I would ...

One afternoon toward the end of 1982 I happened across a trade paperback called The Catalog of Cool, compiled by a veteran music-industry publicist named Gene Sculatti. The book consisted of articles and blurbs by Sculatti and his cronies, among whom were some names—Ronn ...

Sitting to the right of my keyboard as I write are a book and a magazine. The book, purchased for ten cents at the (Salinas, California) John Steinbeck (public) Library’s discard shelf, is a dog-eared copy of the very first of the fifty or so books about Thomas Pynchon, ...

When the old Spy magazine folded in 1994, it left Hollywood columnist Celia Brady temporarily out of work. Before it was revived later that year, she and I briefly planned to launch an eight or twelve page newsletter like the ones investment counselors sell for $300 a year to ...

May, 1946. Willard Rochester sat in his office in the Federal Building in Manhattan. He glanced at his watch. It was 10:15 p.m. He heard, clunking below like the steps of Jacob Marley in the basement, the footsteps of the night watchman. He looked at the coffeepot, idly ...