RUSSELL GREGORY AND CENTICORE BOOKS IN ANN ARBOR (PDF-1799)

Every college town probably has a local bookstore where everyone who is ‘anyone’ educated hangs out. In Ann Arbor in the late 1960s (pre-Borders), that was Centicore Books, originally on Maynard Street, but relocated to South University. Somewhere I read that the official title was “Paper Back Bookstore and Centicore Modern Poetry Shop.” It was the South University period I am writing about here. Sure there were other bookstores in Ann Arbor, but this particular one is where both the students and professors bought their books and hung out. Centicore was the place where you might run into Andy Warhol, Norman Mailer, or John Cage when they were in town. Centicore was “the” place. And what made it that ‘place’ was a single individual, Russell Gregory. He didn’t own the store but he made the store what it was. He knew more about books and literature than any of us, professors included. And he was not simply a walking inventory of book names. He had read them all and could talk to you about them with real intelligence. Literally everyone who read knew Russell.