Shop’s Memories Are Wall to Wall and Cover to Cover

On E Street, in the shadow of the post office and downtown library, sits a shop that looms like an anachronism in the midst of urban redevelopment. The posters on the walls and the magazines on cluttered shelves assault the senses like blasts from a faded past.

Picture after tattered picture celebrates the halcyon days of stars or world leaders long since dead or best forgotten: Richard Nixon and his dog Checkers, John Fitzgerald Kennedy with daughter Caroline, Marilyn Monroe waving to the troops, Fidel Castro, Mary Martin, Hopalong Cassidy, Princess Grace, Ernie Kovacs, Bogie and Bacall.

But the shop also contains artifacts gleaned from the pages of time--a letter from a Union soldier to his girlfriend. He was fighting in the Civil War, and he wrote her of his homesick blues and of surprising news from the front:

You Can Lose Yourself

“The Rebels send tobacco over in a little boat, and we send them coffee and salt. They speak to us across the river. They ask us when we are going to take Washington Battery up behind Fredericksburg.”

You can lose yourself in this shop. But Michael Elliott, who with his partner, Robert W. Mann, runs it, worries more about losing the location--though no such threat appears imminent. The Salvation Army owns most of the block on E Street between 7th and 8th avenues, and would like to develop it as high-rise housing for senior citizens.

But no one knows the real future of such real estate--maybe only fate and the gods of urban redevelopment do.

“The future is somewhat up in the air,” said Elliott, a 38-year-old collector with powder-blue eyes, tufts of wavy hair and a rolling Irish lilt in his gentle accent. “We’ve been in this spot five or six years. If we have to move, we won’t close, we’ll go someplace else.”

Move Not Imminent

Art Stillwell is the business administrator for the Salvation Army in San Diego. He said none of the tenants on the block will have to worry about moving for about eight or nine years.

“Our board has been trying to accumulate property on that block for a number of years with the hope of eventually building a high-rise, low-cost housing project, as a service to senior citizens,” Stillwell said. “I don’t think it’s gonna happen anytime soon.

“We own everything but the building on the corner of E and 8th,” he said. The Mann-Elliott shop, which has no formal name, is at 721 E St. “Our projected cost--of acquiring property and then building the center--is roughly $20 million. We’re very pleased that Mr. Mann is there. He’s a character . . . an old-timer that befits the neighborhood.”

Elliott pretty much runs the shop by himself these days. Mann, 70, manager of a shop of some kind for more than 20 years in San Diego, is now in ill health. He said from his bed that Elliott “knows his business” and can serve the needs of anyone wanting, as the business card says, “fine posters and old magazines, autographs, old letters and original documents.”

Beautiful Covers

Mann came to San Diego after years of working as a book “scout” (tracking down rare books on a contract basis) in his native New Jersey, as well as in New York and Chicago. Here, he turned to the magazine and poster trade, the cornerstone of the shop he and Elliott now share.

“The magazine business is a fascinating business,” Mann said. “The advertising in those old magazines is really wonderful. The people who get interested in magazines collect files of them. Some are quite valuable, and the covers of many are exquisitely beautiful.”

Elliott, an “erstwhile electrician” who spends most of his time minding the shop or poring through its resources, came to know Mann and ads as the history they expose.

He also appreciates the bizarre--a poster from the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus and a menacing war poster that shows a man swimming to the charge: “It is nice in the surf, but what about the men in the trenches? Go and help!”

“People should be immersed in the past,” Elliott said sternly. “Everything that happens is from the past.”

He sighed.

“You know, this is a living and not even a good one. I am an electrician. I could leave tomorrow and make more money, but I love this. My time’s my own, and at any given moment, someone could walk in with something I’ve never seen before. In here, in this old shop, I see something new every day of my life.”