Question of the Day - 09 September 2021

The Gamblers Book Club was founded by the aptly named John Luckman.

Luckman was born in Illinois, served in the Marines during World War II, and stayed in southern California where he mustered out of the armed forces after the war. Luckman was a gambler and a bookie in Santa Monica in 1955 when a local crackdown on bookmaking sent him and his accountant wife Edna, like so many other illegal gamblers before and after, to the promised land of Las Vegas.

Luckman attended dealers school and worked at various casinos downtown and on the Strip. A self-educated man with a passion for non-fiction, Luckman was amazed by two things: one, how ignorant the players he dealt blackjack and craps to were; and two, how little information was published, even as late as the early ‘60s, on how to gamble.

In 1964, Luckman launched the Gamblers Book Club (often referred to simply as GBC, though its official title was the Gamblers Book Shop) as a bookstore, library, and general gathering place where gamblers could share information. The location was at 630 S. 11th St., just off E. Charleston a few blocks west of Maryland Parkway. 

In order to start to fill the shelves of his store with gambling titles, he started reprinting old books on gambling whose copyrights had long since passed into the public domain. He also wrote and published a series of "The Facts" pocket guides to gambling, such as The Facts of Blackjack and The Facts of Craps.

John and Edna published poker writer's David Sklanksy’s first books and sold self-published books by John Patrick and Frank Scoblete. John also helped Anthony Curtis launch the Las Vegas Advisor in the early '80s.

In 1979, Luckman hired the inimitable Howard Schwartz. Howard was born in 1940 and grew up in Brooklyn. He earned a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Montana, a master's degree in science writing from Kansas State University, and a second master's from the University of Northern Colorado in secondary education. He worked as a high school reading instructor before starting at the GBC. He became the renowned "librarian to the gamblers"; his files on everything having to do with gambling were as legendary as they were voluminous and he ultimately donated them to UNLV library's Special Collections and Archives. The collection includes manuscripts, periodicals, newspaper articles, ephemera, profit and probability profiles, and the like. Howard served as store manager, marketing director, editor (books and magazines), and starting in 2014, director. 

John Luckman died in 1987 and his wife Edna took over the reins, with the help of Howard. When she died in December 2002, Schwartz continued to run the store. 

The store was packed to the rafters and pretty rundown by the early 2000s; it was sold in 2005. The GBC move to a new location on E. Tropicana, but with Howard Schwartz nearing retirement, GBC was eventually absorbed by the Gambler’s General Store, now at 727 S. Main St., with 8,000 square feet of every imaginable gaming item.