Whenever a customer walked into Chassman & Bem Booksellers, an independent bookstore that operated on Burlington’s Church Street from 1985 to 1998, cofounder Gary Chassman immediately posed a question. Sometimes he asked them to name three of their favorite authors or most cherished books. Other times he asked simply, “What is your passion?”
“His success was in finding a book that someone was excited to leave with,” said Jennifer Chassman Browne, Gary’s younger daughter.
For nearly four decades, Gary was a fixture of Burlington’s literary scene and a champion of the printed word — first as a bookseller and supporter of local authors and later as a packager and publisher of arty, high-end nonfiction. A lover of literature, art, photography, travel and world music, he was known for his creativity, wit and intellectual curiosity.
Gary, who died on December 8 at age 84, was remembered at a celebration of life at Chabad of Burlington, a Jewish community center. Though he was not devoutly Jewish, family and friends said, holding Gary’s memorial at Chabad was a testament to his lifelong connection to the Jewish community and his love of deep thought and spirited conversation.
Gary, the son of Harry and Molly Chassman, was born in New York City in 1940. He attended the Walden School on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, then Bradley University in Peoria, Ill.
In college, Gary met his first wife, Sally Ann Shless, with whom he had three children, Karyn, Jennifer and Josh. One of his first jobs was managing a Brentano’s bookstore in the Prudential Building in Boston. In 1972, he moved his family to the West Coast to run Huntley Bookstore, which served five liberal arts colleges in Claremont, Calif.
The couple divorced when their children were still young, and the kids grew up living mostly with their mother. But it was in Gary’s bookstores — first in Claremont, then in Burlington — that Jenn and Josh got to know their father well. Both grew up amid the stacks and eventually worked in his Burlington bookstore.
“Because I was such a reader, it was a real treat for me to go visit Dad,” Jenn said, remembering how she explored the college bookstore at age 10. “Often he would say, ‘Go look around and pick something.'”
After more than a decade of managing Huntley, Gary took a job in New York City at Aperture, one of the world’s premier photography publishers. There, he learned the ins and outs of art-based books.
In 1980, Gary married Robyn Bem and moved to Salisbury, Conn. Jenn and Josh remember spending summers at their father’s Connecticut home, where classical music was always playing and Gary enjoyed working in the huge gardens and running up to 12 miles a day.
By the mid-1980s, Gary was searching for a small college town with sufficient foot traffic to sustain a bookstore of his own. A political progressive who’d been active in the anti-war and nuclear disarmament movements and worked as an editor at the crunchy, back-to-the-land Mother Earth News, he found a good fit in Burlington. With Robyn, he opened Chassman & Bem at the top of Church Street.
The bookstore, which Gary managed, soon moved to a larger space at the corner of Church and Bank streets. With 4,600 square feet, quaint reading nooks and more than 40,000 titles displayed on tall, wooden bookcases, the store became a hub for bibliophiles and authors alike.
“You definitely felt like you were in a bookstore from a Nora Ephron movie,” said Weybridge author Chris Bohjalian, who met Gary in 1986 and held a reading of his first novel at Chassman & Bem. Sporting a jacket and tie at work every day, Gary would “appear out of nowhere from behind a bookshelf with a stack of books in hand,” Bohjalian recalled. He was always ready with a recommendation because he remembered his customers’ tastes.
Gary was also devoted to helping new writers succeed, Bohjalian said. He remembers Gary asking him to introduce an in-store reading by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Donna Tartt. At the time, Tartt was an unknown twentysomething author who had attended Bennington College and had just published her first novel, The Secret History. Gary ensured there were enough attendees to make the evening a special event for her.
“Gary was old school in all the best ways,” Bohjalian added. “He was eccentric, and he was idiosyncratic, and I really cherished him as a human being and what he tried to do as a bookseller.”
Chassman & Bem also introduced Gary to Patrick Brown, a longtime Burlington educator, racial justice advocate and founder of the Greater Burlington Multicultural Resource Center. Though the Jamaica native couldn’t say how Gary first developed his interest in Black culture, the two often discussed issues important to the African American community. Gary even attended the 1999 ceremony where then-president Bill Clinton awarded Rosa Parks the Congressional Gold Medal.
“Gary knew quite a lot of influential people in the Black world,” Brown noted, including actor Cicely Tyson, author and civil rights activist Julius Lester, and congressman John Lewis. “In 2005, when I brought archbishop [Desmond] Tutu to Burlington to a packed house, Gary was sitting right there front and center in the audience.”
In September 1992, as Chassman & Bem faced stiff competition from the new Barnes & Noble that had opened in South Burlington, Gary sold his bookstore. By then, he and Robyn had divorced, and Gary was remarried to Deborah Boothby, a woman he’d known years earlier at Huntley.
Gary continued managing the bookstore until March 1993, the same year he founded Verve Editions, a Burlington publishing and book packaging company. The subjects of Gary’s book projects ran the gamut: wetlands, architecture, Jewish fathers, women chefs, photos of Marilyn Monroe. In all, Gary designed, packaged and published more than 75 books.
As Jenn put it, “My dad spent a lot of his energy on bringing beautiful things into the world.”
Gary’s highest-profile project was the 2001 book In the Spirit of Martin: The Living Legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The civil rights leader, whom Gary once called “the only true hero in 20th-century America,” inspired thousands of artworks, images of which Gary compiled into his book with accompanying text. He enlisted Nikki Giovanni, the African American writer, poet and activist, to write the introduction. (She would die, coincidentally, one day after Gary did.) In the Spirit of Martin became a traveling exhibit of King-inspired art that toured museums and galleries nationwide, including the Smithsonian’s International Gallery in Washington, D.C.
Though not all of Gary’s projects generated such fanfare, many of the writers, artists and historians he worked with expressed deep gratitude for his influence on their careers.
“Gary was such a talented man,” wrote Janie Cohen, longtime director of the University of Vermont’s Fleming Museum of Art, in a Facebook post shortly after his death. “Several years into Verve, Gary took on my and the Fleming Museum’s Picasso exhibition catalogue and sold it to Thames and Hudson. I am forever grateful to him.”
Linda Rutenberg, a fine art photographer in Montréal who first met Gary at Chassman & Bem, worked with him on four of her photography collections, including her 2007 breakout book, The Garden at Night: Private Views of Public Edens.
“Gary was very instrumental in my career,” Rutenberg said. “He was a good teacher. He was very organized and a gentle soul [who] … knew everybody in the industry. It was a real pleasure to work with him.”
Working for him was another matter. Strident in his opinions, Gary was a tough boss and could also rub some customers the wrong way. In his 2023 book, The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading, New York Times book critic Dwight Garner recalled working at Chassman & Bem, which employees called “Chastise & Blame, because one of the owners was a scold.”
“He could be difficult and demanding,” said Steven West, who worked at Chassman & Bem from 1989 until it closed, then at Verve. “But I learned a lot from him. He set high bars, that’s for sure.”
Outside of work, Gary was more easygoing and friendly, he noted. West, who started performing as a drag queen in Burlington with the stage name Cherie Tartt, said if Gary had never hired him away from another bookstore in Minneapolis, “Cherie Tartt wouldn’t have been born, and I never would have developed my alter ego. Gary was very supportive of that and would come to my shows.”
Though Gary never officially retired, his son Josh said, his declining health due to Parkinson’s disease prevented him from working in his final years. He moved back to California during the pandemic, which claimed the life of his older daughter, Karyn, in March 2020. Gary returned to Vermont a few years later and died at the Arbors at Shelburne, a memory care facility.
Jenn remembers her father as someone who was “capable of moments of intense sweetness,” a side of him many people never saw.
Jenn recalled the summer during college she spent working at her father’s Burlington store and living in his house. Before leaving for the fall semester, she went into his closet, found a maroon sweater and asked if she could take it with her. Gary said no and told her to put it back.
Jenn left feeling “kind of pissed off” that her father wouldn’t part with it, even though he had a closetful of other sweaters. But when she returned to school and opened her suitcase, she found the sweater folded neatly on top.
“Life Stories” is a series profiling Vermonters who have recently died. Know of someone we should write about? Email us at lifestories@sevendaysvt.com.
The original print version of this article was headlined “‘Gary Was Old School in All the Best Ways’ | Gary Miles Chassman, August 9, 1940-December 8, 2024”
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This article appears in Feb 26 – Mar 4, 2025.
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