Customer Reviews

Hubert's Freaks: The Rare-Book Dealer, the Times Square Talker, and the Lost Photos ofDiane Arbus

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3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

Like dust to a vacuum cleaner, and sucked in faster than I could think to this gripping story of Bob and other protagonists and characters of this marvelous book. Knowing some of them personally added another dimension for me, but the detail of Diane Arbus's intimate perception and insertion into the lives of her subjects brought a deeper dimension to portrait photography. And then of course is Bob, the art dealer in his trader world, with potential marks and hopes of patrons, where the real money is in the art world, to the gatekeepers of that realm posing or installed as museum curators. The book is a tantalizing thriller with insight.

Alen MacWeeney

I suspect that if Carl Jung were alive today he would have gladly contributed a blurb to Gibson's book. One of the things today's contemporary culture has an ambivalence toward is what Jung referred to as our shadow-side, the dark underbelly of consciousness that drives our obsessions, fascinations, perversions, and behaviors in ways we don't always want to own. Diane Arbus was a photographer who was keenly attuned to the shadow in all of us and especially in the culture of her era. In Hubert's Freaks, Gibson has tuned into that strange, dark, fascinating and alluring realm --- both through the subject matter and through the character of his hero/anti-hero Bob Langmuir, a man with more than a nodding acquaintance with his own shadow-side.

In addition to the main story of how Langmuir came to acquire the Arbus photos, his trials and tribulations in authenticating them, and the circuitous route to making a profit from them, there is the equally fascinating side stories of the people of Hubert's Museums. The "freaks", some with their own physical anomalies, others with an ability to tantalize the shadow-side of Americans willing to trade 25 cents for a few minutes in their presence.

This is the sort of book that you start wondering what you will find and finish wondering where you have been --- a world of freaks and the photos that immortalize them from a time that seems long ago but is as close as the world wide web. Fascinating.

Greg Gibson is a superb writer and has succeeded in combining the multifarious strands of a twisted plot to give us a riveting account of a fascinating episode in the life of an American icon. A must-read -- I finished in one flight from NY to SF. Buy it now and give copies to any friends who can read. They will kiss your feet.

Greg Gibson has captured a moment in the slippy-slidey story of Times Square by ressurecting the red-fronted phenomenon of Hubert's Dime Museum, which lived in the time after 42nd St was the center for legitimate theater but before it crashed and forced the City Fathers to scrub the fun out of it. He uses the story of a neurotic antiquarian book dealer who winkled out trunksful of leftover stuff and the Diane Arbus photographs that were in it, to weave a rich ohmigod, New York story that I had thought was no longer available in these low-cholesterol times. If New York in the middle of the 20th century meant anything to you, you need to read this. (Remember Prof. Heckler's flea circus?)

Gregory Gibson is an antiquarian-book dealer who lives in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He has written a book about another rare-book dealer who stumbled on a collection of memorabilia from Hubert's, a flea circus and side show in Times Square that included valuable photographs of the freaks and performers taken by Diane Arbus. It tells a complex and fascinating story of how this cast of characters, not just the side show's exhibits, but the photographer, her estate, the collectors, the museum curators, and the auctioneers, all came to be in one way or another Hubert's Freaks.

Gregory Gibson is the perfect guide to the strange world where freaks and Fine Art collide. He gives not only an overview of how the value of Fine Art by recognized masters has appreciated, and how the market in its ever thirsting quest for new objects to invest in has began to attach the same values to Fine Art Photography, but he is also able to zoom in on Bob, an enigmatic and eccentric collector, and describe how his acquisitions relate to the bigger picture:

"By the same subtle principle that enabled Star Wars characters to detect disruptions in the Force, the gravity of twenty-one newly authenticated Arbus photographs altered the fabric of the universe."

Gregory Gibson is also an adept amateur psychologist, and describes a multitude of characters, always with empathy and evenhandedness. Although his main allegiance is to Bob, he also gives Bob's wife Jan's point of view as they go through a messy divorce. He even enters the narrative himself when he assists Bob in trying to negotiate for some Hubert's material that may have belonged to Woogie, the snake dancer. The main narrative thrust however concerns Bob, who stumbles on a treasure trove of Arbus photographs among some Hubert's Museum memorabilia, and his quest to assign value and meaning not just to the photographs, but to the whole Hubert's archive:

"Bob remained mindful of Charlie and Diane, but his thoughts of them now were more complex. In quiet moments between medications or therapy sessions, he remembered the troubled, intense and exhilarating days and nights the three of them had shared. It was as if they'd all lived in a war-torn country and only he had gotten out alive, bringing the Hubert's archive with him as a memento of all they'd been through together."

Bob tracks down some of the freaks and performers from Hubert's to see if they can shed any additional light on the subject, and also, to see if they have any material to add to the archive. He locates Jack Dracula, who is tattooed over his entire body and was the tattooed man at Hubert's. The tattoos have smeared and faded somewhat over the years, and he is now confined to a wheelchair:

"Jack Dracula was Bob's Queequeg, and Bob made a concerted effort to decipher him."

Call Bob Ishmael. He feels the most connection though to Charlie Lucas, the Hubert's barker and husband to the snake dancer Woogie. Bob and Charlie share the same initials and same birthday: Robert C. Langmuir and though he goes by his middle name, Richard Charles Lucas is his full appellation. Bob sifts through Charlie's papers and discovers a few dream journals. Charlie played "the numbers" and kept track of his dreams in order to try and discover a pattern for picking the winning combination of numbers:

"This year, 1965, is the year of snakes. When I said the year of snakes, you have to be kind to your wife, be kind to your girlfriend is because snakes have always proven through life that you can be murdered by your girlfriend, by your wife."

Gregory Gibson describes Bob's process in his immaculate prose, always with a rare flair for the perfect literary allusion:

"Bob began to feel like a latter-day Sir Arthur Evans--except that instead of cracking Linear A in Crete he was in Philadelphia translating Ebonics B into Langmuirian."

The Bottom Line is that Hubert's Freaks is a great book that delivers a lot of complex material woven into a compelling narrative that delves deep into the heart and soul of a cast of characters that are all in one way or another Hubert's Freaks. Gibble, Gobble, we accept you. Gibble, Gobble, we accept you. You and I, Charlie and Bob, Woogie and Jack Dracula, every one of us, we are all Hubert's Freaks. Gibble, Gobble, we accept you.

Freaks
Exile on Main St. [Super Deluxe Edition] by The Rolling Stones
The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes by Greil Marcus
Jay's Journal of Anomalies by Ricky Jay
Gone Boy: A Walkabout: A Father's Search for the Truth in His Son's Murder by Gregory Gibson
Demon of the Waters: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Whaleship Globe by Gregory Gibson
Wild Tigers & Tame Fleas by Bill Ballantine
Diane Arbus: A Biography by Patricia Bosworth
Chronicles: Volume One by Bob Dylan
Midnight Cowboy by James Leo Herlihy

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Diane Arbus: These are our symptoms and our monuments. I want simply to save them, for what is ceremonious and curious and commonplace will be legendary.
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Hubert's Freaks is intricately woven and engaging. While I was looking more for a book that detailed the environment of the old Times Square, I am not the least disappointed that I got the fascinating story of several unique individuals who crossed paths in bizarre circumstances. This true tail will keep you reading and wishing you could have seen Hubert's for yourself.

An outstanding novel packed with unusual twists and turns, HUBERT'S FREAKS revolves around obsessive antiques dealer and treasure hunter Bob Langmuir, who uncovers unique prints by the legendary Diane Arbus, in the process discovering a new side of not only artist Arbus but the 'weird America' she captured in film. His survey of antiques, freak show exhibits, and more evolves into a catchy road show of discovery in a novel packed with adventure, and highly recommended as a fine leisure read.

To be honest, I am not a major fan of Arbus. However I have read two other books by Gibson and was taken by the clean writing and the way he ties things together. Well, it turned out to be not about her, but about a book collector who developed a fixation with collecting and with the posthumous papers and photos of the well-regarded photographer of unusual people. It is also about the workings of the art world, high-end auction houses, and the collectors who feed material into art commerce.
There are also some interesting and cogent sections on certain parts of american culture, for example, the dime freak shows that employed Arbus' subjects and the urban folk culture of the 60's.
Hubert's Freaks has a great deal of interesting material. And the pacing makes it easy to take it all in.
I've read it twice.
Frank O'Brien

Without spoiling the ending for anyone, this was a fun read but the book ends before the saga ends. If you do an internet search you will see that something happened after where the book ends which adds even more to the long traveled path of the Diane Arbus photos and adds a little mystery to the story. My guess is that the author wanted to get the book out in time to capitalize on a certain event mentioned in the book, but should have waited because what's missing is an essential piece of the story. Check out my related Amazon list on the lost Diane Arbus photos for the full story.

I loved this book. I read it straight through like it was a detective novel. I could not wait to see what would happen next. I loved the story and the strange characters, especially Bob. But most of all, I loved Gibson's wry humor and beautiful writing. This is a compelling and wonderful book.