Gambling in American History

The Gambler’s Book Club is perhaps the only bookstore devoted exclusively to selling books about gambling and gambling-related topics. The store is located near downtown Las Vegas just one mile north of the famous Las Vegas Strip. With over a thousand titles in stock, it is also the largest gambling bookstore in the world. The bookstore’s founder was John Luckman, who began his gambling career as a player and then a bookie in California. He moved to Las Vegas in 1955 to work as a blackjack and baccarat pit boss. From that experience, he became convinced that the players did not know the games and that business could be increased in the casinos if players were more knowledgeable.  He started writing pamphlets describing each casino game. From that start he developed a mail order book business for his pamphlets, as well as books that others wrote on gambling. With his wife, Edna, he secured his location and bought a printing press. Soon he was publishing 120 titles and stocking them for sale.
John Luckman died in 1987, but his store remains under the operation of his wife and Howard Schwartz, a true scholar of Las Vegas gambling history. Schwartz not only knows the name of every important gambler in Las Vegas history, but he has met and interviewed every one of them who was alive in the last twenty years. Edna Luckman and Howard Schwartz make most of their sales now through a mail order catalog and the Internet; however, the store itself is a marvel. It is a place where all gather: players, local historians, the intelligentsia of gambling, casino entrepreneurs as well as dealers, FBI agents, and all sorts of other people just interested in some aspect of gambling. The store has several local competitors who do well but tend to concentrate their sales efforts on other gambling merchandise from chips to antique machines. The Gambler’s Book Club remains the essential bookstore for the industry. <