I forget where I first heard of it, but I can’t get Robert Fitterman’s storefront shop in the Bowery out of my mind. This is an old story, starting on May 5, 2010. And the shop didn’t last very long, by design. It closed on May 27. 

It was only open Tuesdays through Thursdays, and then, only from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Worse than banker’s hours.

Now that might not seem ambitious on the face of it, but it is really about what Fitterman was selling.

Words. That’s right: He sold words.

And letters.

Really, you could walk into Rob’s Word Shop in the front window of the Bowery Poetry Club, 308 Bowery (between E. Houston & Bleecker streets), and buy a letter. Any letter. Or perhaps a word, maybe a favorite you’ve been carrying around in your subconscious for years. 

And if you really felt expansive, you could purchase a whole phrase. Yes, a phrase: “a group of words that work together to express an idea within a sentence, but does not contain a subject or a verb.”  

I suppose you could buy a noun or a verb on the side. Then you might have a motif to hang on a wall. Or a whole sentence to start your next novel. I think a nice phrase which an assortment of letters and other words makes for a thoughtful birthday present.

“For 50 cents a letter or $1 a word, Fitterman, a poet, hand-wrote or typed up his goods for 40 or so customers, many of whom arrived at their selection with his assistance,” writes Joshua Escobar, in a review of the book that grew out of the 11-day pop-up shop.

Right now you are thinking one of two things:

1. He only attracted 40 customers? At those prices? Crazy, huh? A 50-cent letter in 2010, hand-drawn, is worth $0.72 given a cumulative inflation rate of 44.7 percent. (Bureau of Labor Statistics.) This does not account for the artistic value — the possibility that he autographed the purchase or that he inserted personality or a unique style into the drawing.
2.  A book? Yes, the Ugly Duckling Presse released “Rob’s Word Shop” on April 1, 2019 and categorized it as “ART, PERFORMANCE, POETICS” – no doubt sending librarians everywhere into headshaking fits. It is a lovely specimen for $27, cloth-bound in a soothing shade of blue with thoughtfully designed typography and painstaking detail of the transactions. And it is 240 pages.

It is the meticulous detail that stretches the book to 240 pages.

Here’s an excerpt provided by the publisher:

Left apartment on bicycle at 10:30 AM for Rob’s Word Shop. Stopped at stationary store for envelopes and folders ($5.25). Arrived at Rob’s Word Shop promptly at 11:00 AM. First customer arrived at 12:30 PM. Served 6 customers continuously from 12:45 to 2:05 PM. Closed shop and left 308 Bowery at 2:15 PM. Arrived at apartment, on bicycle, at 2:30 PM. Total sales: $7.00. Below is a list of words sold:

Customer 3       tops
Customer 4       technicolor
Customer 5       better
Customer 6       unscripted; off the books (gratis)
Customer 7       Constraint-B
Customer 8       nachleben

As the reviewer Escobar observes, the book includes “the ledgers and transcriptions, and even the carbon-copy receipts from this poetic pop-up shop … From a printer cartridge to the tip for a turkey sandwich, the ledgers track nearly every dollar spent and earned. The transcriptions of his transactions with 40 or so customers record the nuances in his sales pitch and temperament, as well as the quickened or prolonged conversations that unfolded …”

Rob’s Word Shop got off to a great start. On the first day, he waited only 10 minutes for the first customer, actually a couple in a spendy kind of mood. They bought goat, Heather Christle, The SEASIDE!, Minutes, Books, and Walser & Company.  And paid $26.00 for the pleasure.

Forty minutes later, a second customer arrived and bought two words: interpolation and selfhood for only $2.

The transactions leave me wondering one thing: Why?

Not why did they buy words they could easily have lifted from books or posters for free — but why did they choose these particular words?

Fitterman doesn’t judge. And we’re left to imagine what his customers are thinking, who they are, and what do they want with a word like “nachleben”?

Perhaps the real book is in our own imaginations. Fitterman provides the bones. We provide the meat.

This is where the performance art comes in: Fitterman sits there in his shop in suit and tie and has quasi-serious discussions with his customers who play their own roles in these small theatrical pieces. The proprietor guides the consumer toward a purchase, just as a real estate agent might push you toward the purchase of a condo.

Some conversations are in the book. However, most critics I’ve read find these fairly banal, nothing more enlightening than you’d overhear in a hardware shop or pharmacy.

Maybe that is Fitterman’s intent: strip the commodification of words and letters down to the least subjective level. Let the reader interpolate the significance of a transaction.

I don’t know. It is all too New York for me. I just like the idea of a poet opening up a pop-up store where words and letters can be bought for real money. It seems like something the writer Richard Brautigan might have done, had he stuck around.

I suppose it is no different than the Catholic Church selling indulgences to penitents, or slivers of the original cross. My brother’s ex-wife’s father was able to buy an annulment even though they had been married for years and had two kids. 

Makes you think that everything is for sale. 

Or not for sale.

Did you know these words are copyrighted: Jet ski, crock-pot, dumpster, Jacuzzi, Popsicle, that’s hot, onesie, taser, bubblewrap, and ping-pong? And that’s a wee sampling, friends.

Crazy, huh?

In a classic today story, maybe a sequel, Fitterman sells a word to a customer who turns out to be an undercover copyright attorney working for Big Word Inc., a conglomerate that is busily buying up title to words in 37 different languages. 

Fitterman goes to court with a young green attorney and a la “Miracle on 34th Street,” the public writes letters to the judge and saves the day and Fitterman is a hero.

Or maybe Amazon would muscle in and sell words and letters made in China at a tenth of the price and in bulk.

Meanwhile, so many words spin around in my head like a crib mobile.

These have held my attention recently – factotum, versimilitude, abstemious, deleterious, and farrago. But the one that really clings to my consciousness like a child on the first day of kindergarten is anhedonia.

What I wouldn’t pay to figure out why I’m so attracted to that word.

Then there are all the words that fade so quickly from my memory. What I wouldn’t pay to get them all back.

More importantly, what word would you buy, given the chance? Would you want it in script? With a pen or sharpie or typed? Would you like that gift-wrapped or in a discrete envelope?

What would you do with it once you owned it?

(The illustration used in this story was created by an Artificial Intelligence program. I guess that is a form of selling words and letters, too.)