Robert M. Katzman first showed up in the pages of the Reader back in 1977. He was the 27-year-old owner of three newsstands and an upstart periodicals-distribution company who had taken on the giant Charles Levy Circulating Company in a David-and-Goliath antitrust suit that lasted four years and ended with Levy buying him out. Katzman’s next business was the Grand Tour World Travel Bookstore on North Clark, which he acquired just before the national chains came to town. (The store closed in November 1994.) And for the last 15 years he’s been running Magazine Memories and Poster Planet, vintage magazine and poster stores that grew out of a periodical collection he started the day John F. Kennedy was killed. The two businesses occupy a double storefront in a strip mall on Dempster in Morton Grove.
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But over the last five years, Katzman says, things have been “evolving precariously.” Internet dealers have been eating his lunch. His wife–a major contributor to the family budget–developed a debilitating illness and lost her job. Katzman underwent a pair of brain surgeries, bringing the total of his surgical ordeals–which began when he was 18 and lost half his jaw to cancer–to 29. In financial straits, he put his suburban home on the market this fall but failed to find a buyer. Now his mortgage company has foreclosed; he has until the first week of January to move out. He also has to get out of Poster Planet because he can’t afford to rent the two spaces anymore. His 20,000 “posters”–many of them pages or covers from vintage magazines–are on sale at half price through the end of the year, when he’ll somehow shrink back to a single space.
Guess it looks better when they win: The Chicago Bears and the Chicago Park District were among the Chicago Architecture Foundation’s recently announced Patron of the Year award recipients, for their role in the Soldier Field and North Burnham Park Redevelopment.
