"I browsed around and met Izzy Young, the proprietor. Young was an old-line folk enthusiast..."

"... very sardonic and wore heavy horn-rimmed glasses, spoke in a thick Brooklyn dialect, wore wool slacks, skinny belt and work boots, tie at a careless slant... There were a lot of esoteric folk records... Extinct song folios of every type—sea shanties, Civil War songs, cowboy songs, songs of lament, church house songs, anti–Jim Crow songs, union songs—archaic books of folk tales, Wobbly journals, propaganda pamphlets about everything from women’s rights to the dangers of boozing, one by Daniel De Foe, the English author of Moll Flanders... Izzy had a back room with a potbellied wood-burning stove, crooked pictures and rickety chairs.... The little room was filled with American records and  a phonograph. Izzy would let me stay back there and listen to them. I listened to as many as I could, even thumbed through a lot of his antediluvian folk scrolls. The madly complicated modern world was something I took little interest in. It had no relevancy, no weight. I wasn’t seduced by it. What was swinging, topical and up to date for me was stuff like the Titanic sinking, the Galveston flood, John Henry driving steel, John Hardy shooting a man on the West Virginia line.... [Izzy would] write about me in his diary. I couldn’t imagine why. His questions were annoying, but I liked him... Had also instructed me to be kind because everyone you’ll ever meet is fighting a hard battle. I couldn’t imagine what Izzy’s battles were. Internal, external, who knows? Young was a man that concerned himself with social injustice, hunger and homelessness and he didn’t mind telling you so. His heroes were Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Moby-Dick, the ultimate fish story, was his favorite tall tale...."

From Bob Dylan, "Chronicles: Volume One." I looked that up because I read in the newspaper "Izzy Young, whose New York music shop was ‘the citadel’ of folk revival, dies at 90" (WaPo).