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Old City Bookstore a Throwback to a Different Era
L O CAL
JESSE BERNSTEIN | JE STAFF
IT WOULD BE grossly under-
selling it to say that when Jules
Goldman bought his store at
Second and Market streets in
2009, it bore the imprint of
its previous owners, a mattress
company called Foam Land.

There was extensive fire dam-
age, faulty plumbing and elec-
tric, and hulking machines
that weighed in the tons.

Walk in today, and you’re
liable to get a nod from
Goldman before stepping into
an equally overwhelming dis-
play. The 4,000-square-foot
Jules Goldman Books and Art
store is home to hundreds of
paintings, hung on the wall by
local artists or stacked hap-
hazardly on the floor for those
willing to look a little harder.

Thousands of books line the
shelves and spill out of boxes;
some are general reading, but
just as many are rare and out of
print. If you’re looking for, say,
Furniture of the Pilgrim Century
(1910), it can be had here.

Goldman doesn’t discrim-
inate when it comes to music,
either. You can pick up a vintage
Vivaldi pressing as surely as you
can snag a vinyl copy of Cam’ron’s
“That’s Me,” the second track on
his 2000 album, S.D.E. If none of
that does it for you, there’s also a
bar’s worth of beer steins, stacks
of maps and drawings, vintage
posters and advertisements, and a
few imposing grandfather clocks.

Not even to mention knickknacks
and tchotchkes as far as the eye
can see.

“It’s one of very few of its
kind still around,” Goldman
said of his store.

One might say that of
Goldman, too.

Goldman, 71, is the son of
Holocaust survivors who met
in Germany after the war. His
mother had holed up in Siberia,
and his father somehow survived
the war despite living in Poland.

Goldman never knew exactly how
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM Jules Goldman has been an Old City mainstay since 2009. Jesse Bernstein
he managed it, nor did his father
talk much about it, but it didn’t
take much imagination.

“You’re Jewish in Poland
during the war, it’s a little
rough,” he said with a laugh.

His parents made their way
to Philadelphia in 1952, and
Goldman has lived here his
entire life, if you don’t count
a few sojourns to the suburbs
(too boring there, he said). He
went to Olney High School, and
studied at Peirce Junior College
and the Tyler School of Art at
Temple University. He painted
back then and, though he
enjoyed it (he focused mostly on
landscapes, once even getting
his work featured on the cover
of a 1964 Philadelphia Bulletin
magazine), he didn’t feel it was
an efficient use of time.

“I would win awards but never
get any money,” he said. “That’s
why I gave it up. Everybody else
would get the money, and I’d get,
yeah, a little plaque, a certificate,
gee, thanks, what happened to
the money?”
Today, he makes a commis-
sion selling paintings hung on
his walls by local artists.

He spent a few years in the
military, stationed in Germany
and Vietnam during the war.

After all the time he spent read-
ing in libraries during high
school and college, his military
time was filled with anything
but that pursuit. Besides the lack
of English books, he said, he
was just too busy. And when he
did have free time, it was usu-
ally dedicated to drinking. He
shook his head as he described
the long-lost days of beer at 25
cents a bottle and cartons of
cigarettes going for $1.10.

Goldman spent a few years as
an accountant before he decided
to get into bookselling. Back
then, it was easy for him to show
up to Freeman’s Auction and
pick from among hundreds of
boxes of books on a Saturday to
be towed back to wherever his
store happened to be that year.

“Philadelphia had an endless
amount of books,” he recalled.

He’d sometimes buy 40 or
50 boxes in a day. For the rarer
stuff, he’d have to go to auctions,
which he continues to do. He’s
been running into the same buy-
ers in the area for decades. To
them, one of his claims to fame
is that he jumps to buy Judaica.

The store was once on Kater
Street, another time at Fifth
and South streets. The prob-
lem, it seemed, was that every
time he’d find a new location,
the building would get sold a
few months later, and he’d be
off to find replacement digs.

He moved back into the city
when he opened up the current
location. His second wife had
just passed away — cancer —
and he was tired of puttering
around a big, quiet house.

He’s tried to sell online, but it
is, in his words, “too much of a
pain in the ass.” Younger people
don’t buy like they used to, and
older customers are “saturated”
in material, he said. Throw in
the fact that online booksellers
have cut into his business in
ways he didn’t foresee, and it’s
not hard to see why his opera-
tion is largely an analog one.

And if anyone’s interested
in a first European edition of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, he’s been
trying to unload it for years. l
jbernstein@jewishexponent.com; 215-832-0740
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