George Halasz; Ran Landmark Bookstore

George Halasz, 90, owner of the Mercury Book Store in Beverly Hills, which offered one of the most extensive inventories of psychiatric and psychoanalytic material in Southern California. Born in Hungary, Halasz came to the United States in 1921 and wrote for Vanity Fair, the New York Times magazine and the Saturday Review of Literature. He became a translator of the plays of Ferenc Molnar, who he had known in his native land. In 1935 he moved to Hollywood and became a script reader and writer for Metro Goldwyn Mayer and other studios. In 1955 Halasz established his bookstore on Santa Monica Boulevard, then the only bookstore west of the Rocky Mountains specializing in psychoanalytic literature. On Sunday at UCLA Medical Center after a brief illness.