Ron Kolm

Ron Kolm (born 1947) is an American poet, editor, activist and bookseller, based in New York City.

Kolm came to New York in 1970 and got a job at the Strand bookstore, where he worked with Tom Verlaine and Patti Smith. Kolm's career in NYC independent bookstores spanned some forty years. After he left the Strand in 1975 he got a job at the Eastside Bookstore on the corner of Second Avenue and St. Mark's Place where he worked with the future owners of St. Mark’s Bookshop: Bob Contant, Terry McCoy, Peter Dargis, Tom Evans and Ross Lumpkin. It was during this period that Kolm experienced the highs and lows of the pre-gentrified East Village; incidents he later incorporated into his fiction. In 1979 he began working at New Morning Bookstore in Soho, at 169 Spring Street (New Morning was owned by High Times magazine). When it became clear that New Morning was going to close, Ron landed a job at the original Coliseum Books on 57th Street; a position he stayed at for twenty years, with a four-year sabbatical in the mid-1980s, when he worked at St. Mark's Bookshop. During this hiatus there was a 'fiction revival' in the Lower East Side, and Kolm published stories in many of the small magazines that thrived during those years: Joel Rose and Catherine Texier's Between C & D magazine, Kurt Hollander's Portable Lower East Side, Michael Carter's Redtape, the Gary Indiana issue of New Observations and Bob Witz's Appearances (Ron later became an editor of this magazine). When Coliseum Books closed, Kolm worked for a year at Shakespeare & Co. on Broadway at Astor Place, before being rehired by the new Coliseum Books on 42nd Street. When that store closed due to the changing nature of bookselling, Ron continued his career at Posman Books in Grand Central Terminal. That location closed in late 2014 because of impending construction, and moved to Brookfield Place in the World Financial Center. The Brookfield Place store closed in 2015. Kolm now works at the Posman Bookstore in Chelsea Market on the west side of Manhattan.

By 1980 Kolm established his own small press; Low-Tech Press. Before calling it quits a decade later, he had assembled a backlist of ten books (The Low-Tech Manual, Five Plus Five, Girlie Pictures and several Mike Topp titles). As he said to Levi Asher of Literary Kicks: "I published Art Spiegelman, Tuli Kupferberg and Hal Sirowitz, among others."

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