From 1982: The battle of the two Bookbinders restaurants

This story was originally published on April 11, 1982.

There are two restaurants by the name of Bookbinder in this town, a fact that will affect you differently depending on whether you are (a) a Philadelphian, (b) a non-Philadelphian, or (c) a lobster.

Pretend you are a lobster. Fresh in from Maine, you’re hanging around the holding tank, wondering where to go for dinner. Which Bookbinders do you prefer?

Truth to tell, it doesn’t matter much. At the 15th Street Bookbinders Sea Food House, the broiled Maine lobster is delivered on his back, his midriff laid bare and stuffed with roe, his claws extended in a beseeching manner. Flanked by syrupy spiced peach halves, potato and vegetable, he is priced from $15.95 to $36, depending on size.

Across town at Old Original Bookbinder’s, the Maine lobster comes halved and curled, Scorpio-style, with a potato and vegetable. Prices begin at $15.95and end at $38. No peaches here. Either place, you get a bib.

If you are not a lobster, of course, it’s a different story. (This story.)

You will have to choose. Now is when it gets confusing. If you are a non-Philadelphian, you will want to go to the real Bookbinder restaurant.

Which is it? If you are a Philadelphian, you may already have a preference, which you will have to defend. Fortunately for you — Philadelphians and non-Philadelphians alike —this article is going to set the record straight.

At last, you will be an authority at cocktail parties.

To begin with, Old Original Bookbinder’s, at 125 Walnut St., is just what it says it is — both old and original, although maybe not quite as old as claimed. This is the Bookbinder’s that is known the country over as a Philadelphia landmark. But it’s not that simple. The Bookbinder family itself now owns only one of the two Bookbinder restaurants, and it is not Old Original. It’s the other one.

If the family had paid more attention to the rules of primogeniture, properly handing down its restaurant from one generation to the next, there’d likely be only one Bookbinder’s today, the one at 125 Walnut (and that, of course, would be Philadelphia’s loss). Instead, the Bookbinders of yore were a colorful collection of unconventional souls, whose fractious relationships led to a family split — and two restaurants called Bookbinders.

Years passed. Wounds healed. But confusion persists. Scarcely a week goes by that a large party doesn’t jump into two cabs and end up 13 blocks apart, necessitating protracted telephone negotiations that have been known to become so testy that the party remains divided for the meal.

This pattern is open to creative variations. Once, two businessmen who had never met arranged to do so over lunch at Bookbinders. When, after some time, they could not find each other, they jumped to the obvious conclusion. Both got on the phone to their respective offices, only to discover that they were separated by only a few feet.

Then there is the matter of awards. How do you think they feel on 15th Street when an award for excellence is mistakenly delivered to their premises? Or vice versa? They feel terrible. But it happens.

Taxi drivers have been known to complicate the problem by driving to whichever Bookbinders is farther away. “Bookbinders, please,” directed a customer recently boarding a cab at the Franklin Plaza Hotel at 17th and Vine. The cab veered east toward Second Street. ”How did you know I didn’t mean the 15th Street Bookbinders?” the customer inquired when the cab’s destination became apparent. The driver offered this explanation, which may or may not have been true: “This is the only one I know exactly where it’s at.”

Both Bookbinders woo cabbies. At 15th Street, it’s a $2 tip for delivering a party. At Old Original, it’s free coffee and doughnuts and an entry in a weekly drawing for a free dinner.

The tale of two Bookbinders begins with the founder, Samuel Bookbinder, a Dutch Jew who came to this country as a youngster. In 1893, when he was 40, he opened an oyster bar at 525 S. Fifth St., according to a search of city records commissioned by the Bookbinder family in 1955. Records show that in 1898 he moved his oyster bar to 125 Walnut, where Old Original Bookbinder’s is today.

Note the year: 1898. Already we are in trouble. John Taxin, who is not a Bookbinder but who is the owner of Old Original Bookbinder’s, maintains that his restaurant was founded in 1865. He is so convinced of this that he has entered his claim on the menu. So it was that in 1965, Old Original celebrated its 100th anniversary. It was a wonderful celebration for John Taxin — but a source of considerable irritation to the Bookbinder family, who took issue with the chronology.

If the restaurant was founded 100 years earlier, in 1865, it meant that Sam Bookbinder had been a restaurateur when he was barely out of knickers. “How can you open a restaurant when you are 12 years old?” wonders Sam “Buddy” Bookbinder, a great-grandson of the founder who, with his brother Richard, now owns the 15th Street Bookbinders.

That is a reasonable question, worth posing to John Taxin, 75.

“How do you know Bookbinder’s was founded in 1865?” he is asked when intercepted on a quick trip to Philadelphia from his winter quarters in Miami Beach. “This is the story I got when I bought it. I have a book here,” he says in his office above the restaurant, “that talks about having lunch at Bookbinder’s ... an old book.” He rustles unproductively through papers. “What the hell,” he says finally, giving up the search. “I wasn’t around here. I don’t know.”

There is among some the suspicion that Arnold Stark dreamed up the whole anniversary thing. A Runyonesque PR man from the old school, Stark operates out of a telephone booth and plants confidential items with the admonition, “My name is Jones on that quote.” No one but Arnold Stark talks like that any more.

Arnold Stark has been Old Bookbinder’s publicist for as long as anyone can remember, trotting hither and yon delivering Bookbinder cheesecakes to the high and mighty in entertainment, sports and politics. It’s a simple formula.

Drop off a cheesecake and, bingo, hope for a mention by either the star or the press. “I have seen the world thanks to cheesecakes,” Stark says.

Sometimes the old cheesecake routine really pays off. When Bryant Gumbel debuted on the “Today” show, Arnold Stark was there in the pre-dawn hours patiently waiting with the inevitable box from Bookbinder’s. Gumbel gave Bookbinder’s a coast-to-coast acknowledgment, a publicist’s dream. But even a private thank you satisfies Stark. He is a stickler for thank-yous. He has never forgotten that Jimmy Carter failed to respond to the cheesecakes he took to Plains. Getting cheesecakes to Plains “wasn’t easy,” Stark says. “I’m still looking for a thank you.”

Once, the cheesecake ploy backfired. It happened when Ed McMahon lived in Bronxville, N.Y. Stark and his cheesecake arrived on a hot summer’s day when no one was home. Stark deposited the cheesecake on the stoop. And McMahon, upon his return a week later, was greeted by a rancid cheesecake crawling with flies and ants. (Stark got his thank-you as if nothing had gone wrong, and found out only later about the flies.) There are many Arnold Stark stories, more even than about Bookbinders. He talks so fast that he claims to speak “in shorthand.”

One of the stories is about Eisenhower. Nobody believed Stark when he said he was buddy-buddy with Ike. And suddenly, there the two of them were, riding together in a motorcade up Broad Street (or was it down?) for all to see. And then there is the story of Arnold’s 28-year courtship, which ended a few years back in marriage.

But getting back to the Bookbinders’, there is this to be said about that first restaurant: In those days you did not find that many Jews handling oysters and the like, in large part because the Jewish religion frowns on the consumption of shellfish. How to put this in perspective? An oyster is not bacon, but it is not chopped liver either.

So how do you open a seafood restaurant if you are Jewish? Not with lox and gefilte fish, that’s for sure. Let’s face it. No way are you going to hook goyish big spenders without an oyster or two, or some clams and crabs.

Sam Bookbinder may have had some difficulty overcoming his religious scruples. For years he dabbled in other businesses. City records indicate that he sold china and housewares before his midlife career change. And his granddaughter, Harriet Blum, says he was a “very religious man.”

On the other hand, he was clearly not all that religious. And he had an influential wife, Cecilia, an Englishwoman with a talent for frying oysters. Mrs. Blum says she is certain it was her grandmother who persuaded Sam Bookbinder to open a shellfish restaurant. “She was the one with the oysters in her head.”

In those early days, Bookbinder’s served just breakfast and lunch. The large bell Cecilia rang to summon diners at midday still stands on a bar at Old Original. Not until Sam’s oldest son, Manny, took over in the 1920s was dinner added.

Sam Bookbinder thought his son was crazy to serve an evening meal. According to Mrs. Blum, he protested that no one would come all the way to the eastern end of the city for dinner. He was wrong. All sorts of “swanky-danky” people, including prominent politicians of the day, patronized Bookbinder’s, Mrs. Blum says. Bookbinder’s had no liquor license then, and waiters made runs to the corner bar for drinks.

When prohibition quenched even that source, Manny Bookbinder, a colorful gentleman who lived above Bookbinder’s in a room lined with renderings of female nudes, evidently decided to take matters into his own hands. That led to his arrest for bootlegging when federal agents seized about 200 cases of whiskey smuggled in from the Bahamas via New Jersey. A jury deliberated 49 hours before convicting Manny Bookbinder, and he was sentenced to 10 months in Mercer County prison.

Not to worry, though. According to family lore, Manny was friendly with the warden, and generally attended prison in Trenton only for morning roll call.

On weekends, his chauffeured limousine would fetch both him and the warden to Philadelphia for a time on the town. He was released with 50 days off for good behavior.

Meantime, Manny’s sister, Harriet Blackburn, a striking blue-eyed brunette with a taste for expensive jewels, had acquired control of Bookbinder’s by virtue of having lent money to the irrepressible Manny, who was unable to repay it except by signing over the title.

Now, enter a third offspring of founder Sam: Coleman Bookbinder, a police sergeant whose only known arrest took place when a fleeing criminal ran into his arms. (A fourth sibling, Lou, went west as a young man and died “somewhere” out there, Mrs. Blum says.)

Coleman had a son, Sam (hey, keep this straight: he’s a grandson of the founder), who worked in Bookbinder’s for his aunt, Harriet Blackburn. He and Aunt Harriet did not get along. He wanted to air condition; she didn’t.

Things like that. Sam decided he wanted his own restaurant. Coleman knew the perfect place —his old station house on 15th street, which had closed.

In1935, the new restaurant opened.

Aunt Harriet was furious. In 1937, she went to court to prevent her brother and his sons from using the name Bookbinder, but the judge ruled against her, noting, according to the family, that it was, after all, their name.

Sometime later Aunt Harriet married a New York lawyer named Harmon Lubetkin, a union noted by Walter Winchell, perhaps because Lubetkin had a certain status as a show biz attorney who represented Enrico Caruso, Theda Bara and others. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, Harmon changed his last name to Harriet’s, which had remained Blackburn from an early and brief marriage.

Family history has it that Aunt Harriet gave Old Original Bookbinder’s to her new husband as a wedding gift. Harriet Blackburn’s death came unexpectedly in 1944. So, for that matter, did her cremation.

Cremation was not to be the end of Aunt Harriet. Indeed, it began a new chapter in the history of the two Bookbinder restaurants. According to Samuel Citron, 84, an accountant who has worked at the 15th Street restaurant since Sam (the grandson) Bookbinder opened it, the late Mrs. Blackburn’s husband wanted his wife’s ashes buried in a Jewish cemetery. This flew in the face of Jewish tradition. “Jews want the whole body,” Citron explains.

Harmon Blackburn was willing to hand over the Walnut Street restaurant to the Federation of Jewish Charities in return for a burial, Citron says, and Harmon enlisted an influential Jewish judge, Joseph L. Kun, to lobby for him.

On Sunday afternoons, Citron says, the judge would visit his daughter, who was then Citron’s neighbor, for a roast beef dinner and bemoan his progress, which was nonexistent. “The judge worked pretty hard,” he says, “but he could not break it down. There was not a cemetery that would take her.”

Blackburn ended up giving the restaurant to the Federation of Jewish Charities anyway — the cynical concluded at the time that he wanted a tax break — and the legal transfer was executed before Judge Kun.

But the Federation of Jewish Charities soon wanted out of the restaurant business, and the judge, who so recently had tried to find a resting place for Aunt Harriet, now took it upon himself to find a buyer for her late restaurant.

He didn’t look far. His next-door neighbor in a Rittenhouse Square apartment house, one John Taxin, was a prosperous produce merchant who knew Bookbinder’s well. He had sold produce for years across Walnut Street at the wholesale Dock Street Market — the forerunner of the Food Distribution Center. And it was Taxin’s custom, when the market had concluded its early morning trade, to join some friends in paying $1 apiece to Bookbinder’s to cook them fresh fish they brought over for breakfast.

Those were the days.

John Taxin bought and refurbished Bookbinder’s, and over the years parlayed it into one of the city’s main tourist attractions. Bookbinder’s became known for luring celebrities who, in turn, drew the curious. The walls are covered with photographs of famous customers — Cary Grant, Danny Kaye, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, John Glenn. All the greats. Even today, entertainers in town for a performance find a basket of fruit in their rooms and the offer of a limousine lift to dinner at Bookbinder’s. Last year’s thank-yous include one from Katharine Hepburn, for “all the goodies.”

John Taxin’s son Albert, 41, a hospitable, gum-cracking echo of his father, remembers the first campaign to bring Frank Sinatra to Bookbinder’s. Arnold Stark, he says, collared a stewardess on the Los Angeles-Philadelphia run and paid her to have copies of the Los Angeles Times brought in. Stark delivered them daily to Sinatra’s hotel room, compliments of Bookbinder’s. And on the third day, Sinatra came to dine.

While Taxin prospered in the celebrity and tourist trade, the 15th Street Bookbinders under Sam (the grandson) Bookbinder was building a solid local clientele. Today, a typical weeknight crowd at 15th Street is a Center City mishmash of soberly clad lawyers and businessfolk, elderly women in old-fashioned hats en route to the theater, bubble-haired secretaries in heavy eye makeup, two-income couples exchanging work stories, and a scattering of solo male diners. Not that Walnut Street doesn’t have its share of locals, too. They can be found quaffing food and drink in the dark, wood-paneled President’s Room.

Today, Albert Taxin says, Old Original Bookbinder’s seats 1,000, grosses $9 million a year and pays an $11,000 monthly gas bill. The menu has changed little, featuring a broad assortment of simply prepared fish and shellfish, plus a basic line of steaks. That simplicity is one reason for the restaurant’s success, Albert Taxin says. “We don’t borscht it up with a lot of sauces.” He does not claim, however, that the food is exceptional. “You can go to 40 restaurants and get primarily the same piece of fish, the same steak.”

Actually, you can go to 15th Street Bookbinders, which seats 400, and get primarily the same fish and the same steak, too. (The 15th Street owners prefer not to disclose financial data.) “You’re going to get — very frankly — good fresh food at either one,” says wine expert and food maven Shelly Margolis. “I couldn’t say I could tell one from the other unless I looked at the walls.”

For years, when the two Bookbinders constituted approximately half the decent downtown restaurants, the two owners were barely on speaking terms. In time, a new crop of restaurants — seafood and otherwise —sprang up on both sides of Broad Street. Sam (the grandson) Bookbinder died, and John Taxin took to spending much of the year in Florida. Today, their sons, all in their early 40s — Albert Taxin; the third Sam Bookbinder (the great-grandson known as Buddy), and Buddy’s brother, Richard — agree there are too many other competitors to worry about each other.

Indeed, they say they actually like one another. “We are friendly competitors,” Buddy Bookbinder says. “I would cross the street to say hello to Buddy,” Albert Taxin says. “If he was sitting in a bar, I certainly would buy him a drink.”

Waxing magnanimous, Albert says he even wishes the rival 15th Street Bookbinders success. “You know what? I hope they do very good. Fortunately or unfortunately, many people who go there do not know there are two restaurants. I’d hate for them to have a bad time.”

But Albert’s father, John, has never forgiven Sam (the grandson) Bookbinder for starting another restaurant and calling it Bookbinders. In this, he is not unlike Aunt Harriet (you remember Aunt Harriet, don’t you?), who took the name Blackburn but believed “Bookbinder” belonged only to her. “As far as I’m concerned there’s only one Bookbinder’s,” he says. He sounds bitter, and he says he is bitter. “I’m bitter,” John Taxin says, “because they use my name.”

This story was originally published on April 11, 1982.