Frances Steloff

Ida Frances Stelov (December 31, 1887 – April 15, 1989), better known as Frances Steloff or Fanny, was the founder of the Gotham Book Mart in New York City, a center for avant-garde literature and literati from 1920 until it closed in 2007.[1]

Frances Steloff photographed by Lynn Gilbert (1978)

Ida Frances Steloff was born to a poor family in Saratoga Springs, New York on December 31, 1887. Her mother died when she was young, and at 12 she was taken in by a couple who offered her a home. She dropped out of school in the seventh grade. At the age of 19, she moved to New York where she worked at Loeser's, a department store. Steloff then worked in several bookstores, and in 1920 founded the Gotham Book Mart.[2] Steloff challenged government censorship, ordering smuggled copies of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer in the 1930s and purchasing shipments of D. H. Lawrence's banned book Lady Chatterley's Lover in the late 1920s.[2]

Steloff married David Moss in 1923. They divorced in 1930.[2]