Ivan Abrams 1919 - 2000

This town has always been shaped by it eccentricities and its eccentrics. My old, good friend Ivan Abrams comes to mind. I loved the smell and feel of his bookstore. With a potbelly almost always warm with tea water on top, with great books that only Ivan seemed to have, and a listening post that only a deep pull on his pipe would interrupt. I did not know that he had roomed with Brando and knew Jack Kerouac from NYC days. I did not know that he was a Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford. I did know that he was always interested in the person who was in front of him in his store. Sitting on his front porch watching Aspen change in a changeless setting of solitude was a prime pleasure of being downtown. Not the Jerome or the Onion, but Ivans sphere.

Ivan changed over the years from a classics scholar and deep reader of Dostoyevsky to a New Age believer in the star Sirius and other extraterrestrial subjects. To visit him in later years was to be subjected to his belief in the bead and beads he called Crazy where the future was laid out. His major impact was on the people who visited him in the shop, from wandering hippies to very curious intellectuals, to young people in need of solace and courage, to down-and-out souls, to people just downtown looking for a good place to visit.

Ivan loved Lincoln Creek, and I had the good fortune to help him collect wood up there the fall of 1966. Without Ivan around, Lincoln Creek has never been the same. Without the Quadrant Bookstore, Aspen is not the same.

Andy Hanson