|
Transport yourself
back to 1964. The Beatles had just arrived, Elvis' hips had stopped
wiggling making Hollywood movies and John Kennedy's dream had ended
prematurely. In Las Vegas, a blackjack dealer and his bookkeeper
wife, two transplanted Los Angelinos, by way of Chicago, started
a business from their kitchen table, as a result of watching gamblers
lose in the casinos. They believed that if they wrote and distributed
some easy-to-read booklets on the games, the players would have
a better chance.
John Luckman
wrote the pamphlets under the pen name Walter I. Nolan (WIN), a
series called The Facts of�Blackjack, Roulette, Craps, Keno, Baccarat.
Using this well-received initial series as a springboard, delivered
in-person to each Las Vegas casino shop, the Luckmans opened their
first store at 8th and Charleston and then were able to purchase
the shop in the mid-1970s at its present location at 630 South 11th
Street.
The freestanding
building just off the triangular corner of Charleston Blvd, Garces
and 11th Streets quickly became the oasis in the desert for the
broadest and most colorful mixture of people in Las Vegas. Casino
owners, dealers, managers, hosts, sports book managers, oddsmakers,
handicappers, poker players, blackjack theorists and track fanatics
mixed with old-time craps shooters, wild-eyed gamblers, dreamers
and authors on every subject. Throw in all of the Hollywood scriptwriters,
directors, documentary researchers, journalists, and scribes looking
for a fresh angle, and you get the eclectic picture.
This legendary
book shop has as much to do with mundane retail pursuits as the
Library of Congress has to do with your local library. John Luckman's
book shop became a world-class hangout for anyone seeking to exchange
ideas with the greats of gambling, the movers and shakers of Las
Vegas and the man in the pit. Mort Olshan, Johnny Moss, Doyle Brunson,
David Sklansky, Lou Holloway, Huey Mahl, Mike Lee, Jim Quinn, Andy
Beyer, Jackie Gaughan, Bob Stupak, Lawrence Revere, Peter Griffin,
Stanford Wong, Arnold Snyder, Fast Eddie Seremba, Jim Barnes, all
stopped by regularly along with so many others it would take another
thousand words. Damon Runyon would have felt right at home.
On any given
day or hour, in different corners, you could find debates raging
on poker strategy, blackjack counts, pace handicapping vs. speed
ratios, points per yard vs. yards per point�anything under the casino
sun. And in the center of it all stood John, listening like the
benevolent even-tempered zen master he was. Keeping in mind that
there were 16 books in print on gambling when the Gambler's Book
Shop opened its doors, I believe John would be proud of the place
today. There are literally thousands of books.
John single-handedly
birthed the gambling literary revolutionin this shop. He passed
away in 1987 but little has
|
