Sanctuaries

Bookstores as Places of Refuge

I was very young, perhaps twelve years old. At that time I had already been an avid reader, mostly biographies on sports figures, Hardy Boys books, tons of comic books, some historical things, among other things I’ve forgotten about, I’m sure. Books were and have always been something I’ve lost myself in, and I’ve always written stories since the time I was a little kid, although a lot of the time it took a backseat to music, until I turned thirty.

On days whenever my friends weren’t around, and I didn’t feel like sitting around my bedroom, I’d make a trip over to the local bookstore, the Paperbound Bookshop, and it was just over on the other side of the Long Island Expressway, right across the street from the exit of the ramp which took pedestrians over to the other side. It was one of those old school bookstores, jam packed with books, floor to ceiling, and I’ve spent many hours there, just browsing, looking for something new to read. It was that bookstore where I discovered J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings saga and other Sci-Fi and Mystery books I devoured when I was that age. The proprietor was a professorial sort, sort of a cross between Carl Sagan and Jean-Paul Sartre with his corduroy blazer (complete with elbow patches), black horn rimmed glasses, and his ever present pipe. He was always nice to me, always willing to help and recommend new things to this inquisitive little kid who was always walking into his shop. If anything, I think I amused him. I was one of his best ‘customers’, though I rarely bought anything. My allowance wasn’t sufficient enough to buy all the books I wanted, so I mostly went there just to browse and while away the time.

Sadly, by the early 1980s, the store closed down and turned into a health food store, one of the very first in the area, run by a group of hippies who lived in the loft up above the store. I was sad to see it go. Little bookstores such as those weren’t all that common where I grew up.

With Paperbound gone, that left Discount Books, a small used bookstore which sold not only books but comic books, and it was here where my friends and I began going, becoming friendly with the owner, a quasi-hippie who lived in the neighborhood, and he’d often tried to pawn off the more rare and expensive comics on us, as if we had that kind of money to spend. We mainly ravaged the used bins, gobbling up comic books by the handful at 5, 10, or 25 cents a pop. This was more in line with what our meagre allowances could afford. But eventually, that store went under as well. So that pretty much left the chain stores like Barnes & Noble (which weren’t yet the ‘Superstore’ most people are familiar with), B-Dalton, or Walden Books. These stores were good, of course, but it was never the same as those little shops, where service was more personal, and where you often engaged with the owners, getting recommendations (and every now and then a ‘break’ on the price.)

When I reached my teenage years, I began heading down to Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side exploring all the wonderful bookstores they had there — St. Mark’s Books, being one of them, back when it was actually on St.Mark’s Place. I spent a hell of a lot of my time in bookstores and record stores, and these places became my sanctuary, a place to ‘feed the head’, so to speak. Libraries did, too, but I preferred the atmosphere of the small bookstore. There was something about the dusty, haphazard environment which appealed to me. So these little out of the way booksellers, some of which were cramped, dusty, dilapidated basements in close to condemned buildings on the Lower East Side, became my refuge, a place where I can just explore, get inspired,  lose myself for awhile and most importantly, discover new things.

Another of these very old school bookstores was the out-of-the-way Ann Street Books, which I discovered by accident during the mid-1980s. It was housed in a second floor walk-up on Ann Street in lower Manhattan, just a short walk from City Hall. This store was literally teetering on the edge of collapse, the building it was housed in slanting way over to the right. It always amazed me that all those books didn’t collapse the floor beneath them, and you could tell the store had once been an old tenement apartment, and it wasn’t hard to imagine some old immigrant family once living there. The owner was a nice guy, an emaciated man with a patchy beard and a cataract over one eye, and he was often very helpful, and he too would recommend a lot of interesting things to me. But this store is gone too, as well as the entire building, which was eventually condemned and torn down to make way for a luxury condo.

Little by little these stores began to disappear, and not because of people’s lack of interest in books or reading, but because of real estate interests and competition from the larger chain stores. By the 1990s, they were dropping like flies. Some of the old school stores are still around but you can pretty much count them on one hand, and to this day, whenever the mood strikes me, I make what I call ‘the rounds’, an all day excursion where I plan on coming home with a bag full of books to add to the ever increasing pile.

There are a few others — Murder Ink (now long gone), an Upper West Side bookstore which specialized in mystery/crime/noir books. Their fellow travelers, the Mysterious Book Shop, once in Midtown Manhattan and now in TriBeCa. Book Culture in Morningside Heights, The Strand, of course, Westsider Books, Mercer Street Books, Alabaster Books, the only remaining bookstore on what was once known as ‘Book Row’ (4th Avenue), Shakespeare & Co, St. Mark’s Books, which moved several times before finally succumbing, East Village Books on St. Mark’s Place, McNally Jackson, and not to forget those in the outer boroughs — Spoonbill and Sugartown, Book Thug Nation, Greenlight Bookstore, all in Brooklyn, plus more recently, the Astoria Bookshop, and an annex of Book Culture, in Queens (the only bookstores in the borough, if I’m not mistaken). I’m sure there are plenty of others which I’ve yet to discover and explore.

No matter where I travel, there’s always a bookstore I discover nearby, and often actively seek them out. Some I return to time and again whenever I visit. Riverby Books in Fredericksburg, Virginia; Chop Suey Books (now called Self Life) in Carytown, Richmond, Virginia; and Midtown Scholar in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, which is, or should be, a Mecca for book lovers. Then there were those I would discover in other cities, whose names escape me, in Minneapolis, Phoenix, Jackson, Baltimore, San Antonio, Austin, El Paso, San Juan, to name a few. Then there are the one’s I return to whenever I travel to Europe — Shakespeare & Co and San Francisco Books in Paris, where I always make at least one visit whenever I’m there (As far as I know, these are the only two English language bookstores in all of Paris. If there are any others, please let me know). There are many of which I’ve forgotten their names, in Barcelona, London, Madrid, even the one treasure trove I stumbled upon while vacationing in St. Lucia.   

Wherever they are, these bookstores will remain those sanctuaries they had always been for me — places that exist because of the love of the book, the love of reading, and not solely motivated by commerce and the bottom line that you see in the larger chain stores. Since the advent of Amazon and the eBook, it’s hard to say what’s going to happen to these places (and even the larger chains. Look at what happened to Borders). So long as there are lovers of the book as an object, and not only as something simply to read and pass the time, they should survive. But they are more than retail outlets. They will continue to be my sanctuary from the can of bees which is life in New York City. Places to while away the time, to find that unknown treasure, to find something you never expected to find, something that changes your life, but more importantly, a place to be inspired by being surrounded by all those books. They can serve as an oasis in the sometimes frenetic world in which modern life has become.