Some History Of Our Company
Stanley Marcus, the other
half of the venerable Neiman name, helped us to maintain a course of high
quality. Mr. Stanley once told me that he didn’t care how well we could
sell them, T-shirts did not belong in a Levenger catalog. He also told
me that quality is remembered long after price is forgotten—a sentiment he shared
with Marshall Field. And my father, Len Leveen, was kind enough to pass on his entrepreneurial gene to his son. “Fast pay makes fast friends” is just one of his maxims. We continue to reap the benefits of his wisdom and counsel, sometimes over an untoasted bagel and coffee in our Florida store’s café.
Truth and beauty We strive to instill such meaning in the products we offer, sometimes in the small details, other times in the grand moments—as when we sold a desk of Henry Morton Stanley’s in 1997, and a first edition of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, Charles Dickens’s first novel, in 1998. In the spring of 2000 we presented a walking stick of Sir Isaac Newton’s; in the winter we unveiled a bronze bust of Mark Twain by sculptor Zenos Frudakis.
We also like to bring customers more than the sum of our products—as the beloved New Yorker cartoonist and Levenger Press illustrator Edward Koren did in a visit to our store, and as Alexandra Stoddard did when she gifted store patrons with her memorable presentation on letter writing. Most of all, we hope we help our customers find truth, beauty and meaning in what the literary critic Harold Bloom calls “the most healing of pleasures.” That would be, of course, reading.
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