A bookies mecca

Las Vegas

The lure of Sin City has a lot to do with the baser popular pursuits -- gambling, glitz, free-flowing alcohol -- all summed up in the tourism campaign “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.”

So when Mandalay Bay exec Glenn Schaeffer decided his hotel needed a place where intellectuals could gather, some people didn’t take him seriously. In fact, when he asked Irma Wolfson, the assistant manager of Book Soup in South Coast Plaza, to help him create such a place in the form of a literary bookstore, she was too surprised to laugh.

But Schaeffer, president and chief financial officer of Mandalay Resort Group, which owns the Mandalay Bay, Luxor and Excalibur hotel casinos here among others worldwide, was persuasive. He had corporate backing for the bookstore, to be set among the 41 shops at Mandalay Place, the new 100,000-square-foot retail space in the sky bridge between the Mandalay Bay and Luxor hotels. And he had a passion.

“What could be a more obvious place for a bookstore than a destination that has nearly 40 million visitors a year?” Schaeffer argued. “Plus we have the community and intellectuals from the University of Nevada. If we open a bookstore, add a coffee place, a wine-tasting store and an art gallery, suddenly we’ve created a neighborhood, a corner of intimacy in a city where everything is on a grand scale.”

Swept up in Schaeffer’s dream, Wolfson left Book Soup in April and, as the new book buyer, began developing the Reading Room at Mandalay Place. She opened the 1,252-square-foot bookstore, a refuge of dark woods and curving Art Nouveau lines, late last month.

The distressed Brazilian cherry-wood parquet floors and coffered wood ceiling inlaid with a floral design lend the ambience of an old library. A camel-colored leather armchair tattooed with brass studs beckons near a fully stocked magazine rack that includes specialty periodicals such as Collezioni, a $60 Italian magazine that covers the Milan fashion scene.

Schaeffer arrives for his first look at the Reading Room on opening day. Though not a tall man, he exudes power and charisma. The first thing Wolfson shows him is the 75-pound, $6,000 book on display by the front door: “Modern Art: Revolution and Painting,” published by ArtMedia in Italy. “There were only 1,000 copies printed in English, and only 200 are available in the U.S.,” Wolfson says, opening the book to a double-page illustration of Cezanne’s “The Bathers.”

“Order me a copy,” Schaeffer says. “I need one to put with my art collection.”

Wolfson unlocks two glass cases that display the store’s rare and limited-edition books. They include a $675 Phaidon photography book, “Elliott Erwitt Snaps”; a $300 slipcase edition of Magritte paintings; and the $150 “Dice,” signed by the author, magician Ricky Jay.

Schaeffer is most interested in the hand-bound, illustrated Rainmaker Edition books by Russell Banks and Nobel Prize winners Toni Morrison and Wole Soyinka, which are numbered and signed by the authors and artists -- $1,800 for lettered editions, $900 for numbered editions. They are published by the International Institute of Modern Letters, a program that Schaeffer founded in 2001 to support writers in developing countries. “All the proceeds go to help authors of conscience and dissent around the world,” he says proudly.

A graduate of UC Irvine, Schaeffer earned a master’s from the prestigious Iowa Writers program in 1977. Among other things, he says, the experience taught him that he’d “be more useful to the literary world by writing checks instead of books.” He channeled his love of literature into funding the institute, housed at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and its sister program, the International Center for Writing and Translation at UC Irvine.

When he began planning the store, Schaeffer knew immediately whom he wanted to run things. He has a vacation home in Newport Beach, where he often visited the Lido Bookshop, where Wolfson once worked. “The Lido was tiny, but it had a great selection of books,” Schaeffer says. He tracked Wolfson to Book Soup. “I wanted Irma to replicate that type of bookstore,” he says.

Wolfson says that when she ordered books for the Reading Room, she started with “the best of the best” of the latest hardback fiction and nonfiction and books about pop culture, art and architecture. “I chose titles by what I liked, by what was ‘hip’ and ‘cool’ and by what I thought a real bookstore should have,” she says, pointing to paperback copies of works by J.D. Salinger, John Updike and Saul Bellow.

“We’re still waiting for the spinning rack to hold our 100 Penguin classic titles.” An avid reader, Wolfson says she reads four books at a time. “I always keep one by my bed, one in the kitchen, one in the bathroom and one in my car in case I get stuck in traffic.”

She points out two small sections that she felt should be included in a Las Vegas bookstore: books about gambling and erotica. “I chose what I considered artistic, not sleazy, erotic books.”

The Reading Room also has small science-fiction and romance novel sections, an extensive selection of mysteries, books devoted to food and wine, and children’s books. “The children’s books are for bored kids dragged to Las Vegas by their parents,” Wolfson says, “and for parents who don’t bring their kids and feel guilty, so they buy them a present.”

As Schaeffer roams the bookstore, he stops to read the handwritten recommendation cards that Wolfson has posted near her favorite titles. “This shows that we’ve got a real proprietor,” Schaeffer says. “It’s high time a city this big had a literary bookstore.”

During the first day of business, visitors who wander into the Reading Room include Xandra and Maurijn, a Dutch couple on their honeymoon, who say they find the bookstore a relief after the noise of the casinos.

“Our first impression of Las Vegas was that it was full of people carrying around cups of quarters,” Maurijn says. “This is more sophisticated.”

Other shoppers include an Italian who buys a how-to book on blackjack, and Larry, from Ventura, who spends two hours in the store and is there when it closes at midnight.

“My wife likes to gamble, but I don’t, so usually I’m bored in Vegas,” he says, clutching his new purchase, “Love in the Time of Cholera” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

“People come to Las Vegas to indulge,” he adds. “Here they can indulge in reading.”