The Oracle, Ben McFall -- ep. by Howard Rambsy II

A short take on Ben McFall, who managed the fiction section at the Strand for over four decades. 
Written by Howard Rambsy
Read by Kassandra Timm

Transcript

In 1978, a 30-year-old Black man named Ben McFall began working at the Strand, a bookstore in New York City. 

Mr. McFall didn’t expect to stay at the job for that long. He’d work at the bookstore a few years and then move on to something else. But as it turns out, he ended up working at the Strand for more than four decades. While there, he managed the fiction section, and he became known as “the oracle of the Strand.”

You’re listening to Remarkable Receptions — a podcast about popular and critical responses to African American novels and more. 

Usually, in discussions of literature, we focus on novelists and book reviewers. We focus on editors and scholars. We talk about student readers and general audiences. But what about book clerks – the workers at bookstores who assist visitors in locating particular novels and authors? Those clerks arrange books on shelves and on display tables. They read novels and book reviews, listen to customer responses, and make suggestions on reading materials. In other words, book clerks contribute to the reception and circulation of novels. 

If you visited the Strand bookstore anytime over the, well, last 40 years, then you likely saw Mr. McFall. If you were curious about a fiction title, then he would let you know if they had a copy, and he’d walk you to the specific shelf where the book was located.  

Frequent visitors quickly realized how knowledgeable Mr. McFall was about a range of topics, so they would ask him for recommendations concerning novels, volumes of poetry, biographies, memoirs, and more. 

And Mr. McFall did more than make suggestions about books for people to purchase. One of his job responsibilities included making decisions about the price of hardcover fiction titles. 

Mr. McFall became more widely known in 2013, when The New York Times did a profile article about his time at the Strand. Among other items, the article revealed that Mr. McFall offered suggestions to Cicely Tyson, who was looking to make book purchases for her friend Oprah Winfrey. 

Mr. McFall died in December 2021. He was, as an obituary in the New York Times noted, “the longest-tenured bookseller in the history of New York’s most storied bookstore.”

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This episode was written by Howard Rambsy. The episode was edited by Elizabeth Cali. 

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This podcast, Remarkable Receptions, is part of the Black Literature Network, a joint project from African American literary studies at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and the History of Black Writing at the University of Kansas. The project was made possible by the generous support of the Mellon Foundation.  For more information, visit blacklitnetwork.org.