Product Details
Hubert's Freaks: The Rare-Book Dealer, the Times Square Talker, and the Lost Photos of Diane Arbus

Hubert's Freaks: The Rare-Book Dealer, the Times Square Talker, and the Lost Photos of Diane Arbus
By Gregory Gibson

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Product Description

Bob Langmuir is an obsessive dealer with a remarkable eye for treasure who makes the discovery of a lifetime when he chances upon a trove of never-before-seen prints by the legendary Diane Arbus. From the moment he purchases a trunk containing the archive of Hubert’s Dime Museum and Flea Circus—a midcentury Times Square freak show frequented by Arbus—and discovers some intriguing photographs, he knows he’s on to something. Furthermore, he begins to suspect that what he’s found may add a pivotal chapter to what is now known about Arbus and the “old weird America,” in Greil Marcus’s phrase, that Hubert’s inhabited.

Langmuir’s ensuing adventure, filled with bizarre coincidences, turns into a roller-coaster ride that takes him from memorabilia shows to the curator’s office at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Will the photos be authenticated? How will the Arbus estate react? most important, can Bob, who has seen more than a few promising deals head south, finally make his one big score?

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #102916 in Books
  • Published on: 2008-04-01
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • 288 pages

Features

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
From the late 1950s until her death in 1971, renowned photographer Diane Arbus took pictures of oddball performers at the now-forgotten Hubert's Museum, a typical freak show in New York City's seedy Times Square. One frequent subject was Charlie Lucas, first a freak himself, later an inside talker. In 2003, Bob Langmuir, an anxiety-ridden, pill-popping, obsessive antiquarian book dealer from Philadelphia, unearthed a collection of photographs and memorabilia, including Lucas's journals and what he thought were Arbus's photos. This trove of genuine American kookiness came to dominate his life. Following Langmuir's quest—from the slums of Philadelphia to the halls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art—as he gathered, priced and ultimately came to understand this collection, author Gibson (Gone Boy: A Walkabout), himself an antiquarian book dealer, effortlessly twists these strands together with an emotional wallop. His toil in Hubert's vineyard, Gibson writes of Langmuir, amounted to no more or less than the continuing archaeology of the old, weird America. Gibson's laser focus on Langmuir's shifting state of mind as he struggles to master his personal demons and navigate the pitfalls of his own obsession gives this story its heart and opens a window onto a lost part of the American soul. 21 b&w photos. (Apr.)
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From Booklist
Hubert’s Museum was a freak show that existed since the 1930s in New York’s Times Square—an area long since cleaned up and homogenized for the general public. Hubert’s closed in 1965 and from then on existed primarily in the documents and photographs that were put into storage. But Hubert’s seedy past remains culturally significant because it offers a peephole view of a less-sanitized America. Also, it was one significant artist’s portal and first foray into the world of freaks—photographer Diane Arbus. In 2003, quirky collector Bob Langmuir unearthed some of Hubert’s pieces and soon realized that he was sitting on a batch of unknown Arbus prints. His journey to get them authenticated by Arbus’ estate and appraised by various auction houses—during which he got divorced and was institutionalized—makes up the bulk of this fascinating account, which takes readers into the backroom dealings of collectors, art galleries, and museums. How the Arbus photographs are tied to Hubert’s and what ultimately becomes of them are the central mysteries that will keep readers raptly engaged. --Jerry Eberle

Review

PRAISE FOR HUBERT'S FREAKS

“Gibson has written a panoramic story that takes in sideshow culture, Diane Arbus, African American social history, the image market as it ranges from foreclosure sales to Chelsea galleries, and much more. Its principal focus, however, is one man’s life—his dreams and ambitions and delusions and dashed hopes—and that is what makes the book uncommonly moving, utterly engrossing.”—Luc Sante

“Hubert’s Freaks will fascinate those among us who are stimulated by the richness and variety of American subcultures. I devoured it.” —Larry McMurtry

Customer Reviews

Brilliant Book5
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.

An encounter with the shadow side...4
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.

Hubert is only one part of the drama5
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