Kirk Wallace Johnson
"Michael Rips’s surreal style is perfectly suited to the wondrous world of flea markets. The Golden Flea delights with portraits of people on the margins of city life, the eccentric and easy-to-ignore pickers, collectors, vendors, and others obsessed with laying claim to a piece of the past. In describing his own fortunes and follies in that world, Rips captures the best and worst of what it means to collect."
Bookforum - Luc Sante
"A tender, passionate, melancholy elegy."
Patricia Marx
"I love this book so much I decided to mark my favorite bits with asterisks and ended up with something that looked like the Milky Way galaxy."
Shelf Awareness
"Discovering the flea through Rips's experience is magnificent, but the human influence on the transactions…give it true beauty."
Joseph O’Neill
"An extraordinary portrait of a New York filled with unlikely treasures, human and material. Michael Rips is a magician of seeing, and only he could have come up with this enchanted construction."
Wall Street Journal - Ben Downing
"[Rips] has humanity, humor and the gift of a limpid, agile, unpretentious prose style…A captivating portrait."
Paris Review "Staff Picks" - Lauren Kane
"[Rips] captured the singular vocational pull of the collector, and in doing so…show[s] us the whimsical and strange roots that run deep beneath stuff."
David Salle
"Michael Rips writes with a unique combination of sly humor, close observation, and sympathy. He takes the philosopher’s long view, is impressively open, and treasures all manner of people and experiences. He finds gold in stories that might otherwise go unremarked. This book is exemplary in its inclusiveness, humanity, and wit."
Kirkus Reviews
2020-01-13
Manhattan denizen Rips shares his passion for the Chelsea Flea Market, which used to be "one of the largest flea markets in America."
At its zenith, the market thrived on the west side of Manhattan, mostly on Saturdays and Sundays, with buyers and sellers coming and going from abandoned parking garages, open-air lots, old office buildings, and sidewalk stands. In his third book, Rips, who lives in the Chelsea Hotel and serves as the executive director of the Art Students League of New York, focuses his compact yet detailed narrative of oddball possessions and quirky humans on a parking garage that offered merchandise from dozens of vendors. Their customers included native New Yorkers seeking bargains, tourists wandering by, "pickers" searching for underpriced treasures that could be resold for profit, and buyers who could be considered hoarders. In addition to chronicling the goings-on of the many eccentric characters that frequented the market, the author also writes about his daughter and their trips together to the flea. She seemed to enjoy herself, and many of the vendors enjoyed entertaining her. Throughout the book, Rips muses, often entertainingly, on the people he met during his forays in this unique environment, but few of his portraits feel more substantial than sketches. While he is to be commended for diligently listening to them spin their background stories—many of them likely embellished—Rips rarely verified the facts of these sagas, preferring to hear without judgment. Because the author identifies the characters only by first names and nicknames, readers may need to take the findings with a grain of salt. There's a sometimes-pleasing surreal quality to this journey that fits the idiosyncratic landscape—in which sellers hawked everything from "paintings, lithographs and photographs" to "canes, vintage clothes, costume jewelry, tools, Asian scrolls, screens, and jade, sports memorabilia, and African art," not to mention "stacks of crumbling newspapers and magazines"—but one wonders if Rips could have dug even deeper to produce a fuller picture of this world of lost and forgotten treasures.
An intriguing but slight sociological snapshot.
