The famed Gotham Book Mart (“Wise Men Fish Here”) has sold off books to pay its landlord.

The line outside the Gotham Book Mart in Midtown snaked down the block yesterday morning. Several dozen eager bargain hunters, book dealers, art collectors and former employees of the storied shop waited to bid on a piece of literary history.

They had each put down a $1,000 deposit for the privilege of attending the auction. Books signed by John Updike. Letters from D. H. Lawrence and Anaïs Nin. Andy Warhol’s wig rack. All were up for sale.

In the end though, all the property that was auctioned went to the building’s landlord for $400,000.

The auction was ordered after a judgment last fall evicting the store’s owner, Andreas Brown, over a claim of more than a half-million dollars in rent owed. Now the landlord plans to sell the property.

Yesterday, Mr. Brown, 74, got teary while removing books from the shelves in his office. He left before the auction began.

“It’s a bit like interviewing me at my own funeral,” said Mr. Brown, who has a penchant for quoting Mark Twain.

The back room of the Gotham was where I used to find the little magazines I submitted to and appeared in during the 1970s and early 1980s. The Gotham’s former owner, Frances Steloff, then in her nineties, used to have a desk back there and we chatted sometimes. She knew everyone, it seemed, from Tennessee Williams to Norman Mailer and Mary McCarthy. Miss Steloff is a character in “An Irregular Story” in my book Highly Irregular Stories.

I remember once attending a Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines award ceremony upstairs. We all stood around, listening to the MC, poet and former Senator and Presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy, announce and hand out the awards. When the poet Siv Cedering (Fox) had to go up to collect her award, she gave me — standing next to her — her handbag to hold, but she forgot to retrieve it so I spent fifteen minutes in a crowded room walking around with a woman’s handbag trying to give it back.

Is everybody dead out there? What, Ed’s charisma is non-transferable?

Okay, so this is riffing off of something on my own blog, but what the hell. There’s no harm in it. It won’t result in babies being shoved onto spikes or anything.

Got a deep, dark literary secret? Want to share? Go ahead–post to the comments. Anonymously if you like. (Ed does allow anonymous comments, right?)

C’mon. You know you want to. It’ll make you feel clean again.

John Burdett’s Bangkok Tattoo, his second in a series of “mystery” novels featuring a Buddhist cop named Sonchai Jitplecheep, created some controversry with its attitude toward the sex trade in Thailand and its supposed creation of stereotypes of Westerners. The novel received many good reviews, but few reviewers seemed to notice that Bangkok Tattoo is an excellent post 9-11 novel in the way that it shows the influence of that event on other parts of the world. Jitplecheep’s involvement in the investigation of a murdered CIA agent and his encounters with two jaded/incompetent CIA operatives also on the case, provides a fascinating view on the fantasies we’ve fed ourselves while taking on an enemy that is not a nation but a state of mind. on several levels, from the mysteries of his violent past to his conversations. Perhaps one of the main points of Burdett’s novel is how the rest of the world has to live with America’s rather unimaginative interpretation of “terrorism” and it’s equally unimaginative response to terrorism.

The genius of the novel is how it manages to deal with these themes in a non-didactic way while still being successful as a mystery-thriller, a study in extremely deep characterization as we find out more about the murdered CIA agent, and a fascinating look at the effect of American policies on moderate Moslems.

In this case, you can clearly see the damage a genre label does to a book. Burdett’s Bangkok Tattoo is several things at once, does them all successfully, and yet to most people it’s, on the surface at least, a lurid sex-and-violence-filled mystery novel. This kind of categorization tends to limit and dull discussion about a book.

Anyway, if you haven’t checked out Bangkok Tattoo, you should.