I filed this away in November as something a series on bookstores might discuss, a list, complied by the Gothamist blog, of the ten best bookstores of New York. (It's the first article in the list of articles tagged "bookstore," because the article itself is in a format DKos won't recognize.) Subjective, obviously. The premise is, once again, the decline of the bookstore as exacerbated by the crisis in print media:
"A town isn't a town without a bookstore," Neil Gaiman once wrote. Thankfully, New York City has nothing to worry about. Despite the neverending drumbeat of "print is dead" headlines that pepper your newsfeeds, pulp pushers are alive and well here.
Well, of course, the idea of the publishing capital of the country not having lots of bookstores is untenable, never mind the demise of bookstores run by the publishing houses Scribner's and Doubleday since 1980. So let's see what approach they take to this subject.
A handful of bookstores recently popped up in Bushwick since we made our last list, while Queens finally got an independent bookstore of their own, Astoria Bookshop. We've rounded up the ten best bookstores in the city—a contentious endeavor, we know.
It feels to me that this is a search for neighborhood bookstores, although the bookstores I remember in midtown Manhattan, notably Scribner's. Brentano's and Rizzoli, were very much bookstores to the world. Mostly, these are independent (and quirky) bookstores in located in Manhattan (south of 125th Street) and the, if you will, Manhattanized and Manhattanizing sections of Brooklyn. No real surprise that Queens and the Bronx are absent; I mean, how much space does
New York Magazine, for instance, give to either borough unless they're talking about Asian food anyway?
One general bookstore, of course. The Strand! This is what they have to say about it:
Though you may roll your eyes at the hordes of tourists in T-shirts emblazoned with its logo, making a list of the city's bookstores without naming the Strand would be sacrilege. Yes, its fame as a totebag emporium and employer of hotties is well-known, but its prices and selection are seldom beat. And there's still the unique thrill of finding a copy of The Grapes of Wrath once belonging to the Rikers Correctional Library in their 49-cent bin. Events in its stunning Rare Book Room give even the most run-of-the-mill readings an air of literary grandeur.
Yes, sacrilege. I can't be in Manhattan without making a pilgrimage to the Strand. Period. Everything you possibly could have thought of, including a MASSIVE selection of cookbooks. I go to find books to read on the plane back, and I give myself at least an hour. Like any modern bookstore, it has a website (linked above, as, in fact, are all the bookstores in this article, although not all of the links are to the retail operations of the store), and I'm thinking I'm going to stop buying all my books at an aggregator site like bookfinder.com or alibris.com or at the behemoth that is Amazon and go to Strand first from now on.
But the other nine? One, 192 Books in Chelsea, is described as a "carefully curated" store, another is near "an artisanal mayonnaise" emporium, and a third is someplace you go either on your way to or on your way from the big Trader Joe's on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. Most of them have schedules of writers who will read from thie books (incidentally, going to readings was how Jim and I spent many of our homeless evenings in San Francisco, particularly at Modern Times on Valencia and the Booksmith on Haight). You would expect that in New York, which is a big city made up of many smaller communities within the five counties that compose it, but are there many other cities you'd expect it of? I just don't know.
So, the question is could you compose a list for this in your own city? I don't know that I could for Los Angeles but that's probably because I'm not looking for scheduled readings any more because I'm a daytime person here due to the transit schedules after dark. If not, is there a bookstore in the community you live in that you'd like to being to the attention of the Kos community? I've burned off a lot of my dissertation already here, and I'd love to learn more about the rest of the country.
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