Field Trip: Bookstores, Part One

photo: Eric Diesel

For many New Yorkers, another brick has fallen from the facade of our beloved Village with the closing of Partners in Crime. This mystery bookstore had been dispensing tingles of the spine and curdles of the blood for as long as I've been a New Yorker. It was a hub not just for mystery readers and writers but bibliophiles of many kinds. I met one of my first publishing authors there as he thumbed through Ellroy paperbacks and took some time to discuss an LA-based mythos with a young writer, even as we were both keenly aware that we were smack dab in the middle of the West Village. And it wasn't just writers and readers. For years, in a ritual perfectly in tune with the bohemian vibe of a weekend afternoon in the Village, actors and audience converged at Partners for staged readings of old-timey radio whodunnits. The bookstore took its cue from the stock to become a community center for souls touched by the specific allure of the mystery novel. There was a cup of tea for cozy readers and a collection of raven paraphernalia for fans more macabre. It could be anywhere from Christie's countryside to Chandler's downtown, but it was always centered in the imaginative nature of the Village.

Poking through bookstores used to be one of the great pleasures of living in New York City. In every way from the cultural politics of beat to the daily grind of great publishing houses, from the ivied studiousness of a lit major to the street level expressiveness of a slam poet, writing and reading are as fundamental to the city as bagels, the subway, and the Sunday Times. As students of all ages and schools settle into the post-Labor Day rhythm of textbooks and pencils, here are some of my favorite places for writers and readers in New York City. Many no longer exist and some exist in altered form, but from survivor to casualty, individually and collectively they are important to the cultural fabric of New York City.

It is appropriate to start with back to school, for study brought so many of us here. I arrived for graduate school on a blistering August Sunday that commenced a week-long orientation that included induction into the rites and rituals of the university library consortium. We learned that students at the city's participating universities could utilize any university library within the consortium, including, this young design student was delighted to find out, those in the museums. As with most scholarly libraries, materials did not typically circulate, but neither did any instructor typically brook explanations for a failed presentation. Doing one's research became an education of its own, not just in the topic at brush but in getting to know the city. We all got used to researching the picture libraries at Parsons, the New School, Lincoln Center, and NYPL, as well as doing deep research in the study rooms of the city's museums. So before we even hit the cobblestones in search of a good bookstore, let us first raise our university-issued id cards and whatever coffee money we have to libraries, museums, and the curators, librarians and volunteers who staff them.

While we bought whatever textbooks we needed to at the NYU bookstore in its old location before ducking into the nearby Waverly coffee shop for breakfast-served-all-day, most of us had to be creative as we stocked our shelves. Used book vendors ringed Washington Square, selling Grove Press first editions off of folding tables for cash. I became familiar with Applause Bookstore and the Drama Book Shop, even though I had to walk from the Village to Times Square to get to them. These were great sources for materials for film and theater artists, as were the Broadway themed gift shops around Times Square which still exist. As they did then, these shops contain sections devoted to play scripts and theatre books. One only has to visit to be touched by the dreams and the dreamers these places help to inspire.

Back in the Village, the aptly named Shakespeare and Company was just across Broadway on the eastern edge of campus, conveniently hubbed with Unique Clothing Warehouse, Ricky's and Antique Boutique for an art student's full afternoon of shopping once the work-study checks started rolling in. Cooper Square books was just around the corner on Astor Place, but then as now, in this town of bookworms, no institution is more vital than The Strand. Here, expansions continue as their famous "one mile of books" increases in distance every day. Both the books and their readers appreciate the expanded quarters, but I have to confess that I miss the cramped Strand of yore: poking through stacks scavenging for a review copy of a new release to spend a few precious dollars on as a holiday present for John. On one such excursion, I collided with a production assistant as I exited the tiny, grimy bathroom that used to be hidden, in best Curiosity Shoppe fashion, below a staircase, who asked if I'd be an extra in a scene that was filming in the stacks. That was how I spent that afternoon, and I earned enough to pay for -- you guessed it -- books.

In reflection of the richness of its cultures, New York City used to be a haven for specialty book shops, and speaking of that young, broke couple, nowhere was the specialty bookstore more central to a community than among LGBT people. I still remember the first time I set foot in The Oscar Wilde Book Shop and A Different Light. I cannot overstate how freeing it was to be in a place just for us, where I was validated, and where, yes, there were cute guys (who read!). But then, the right to cruise is part of that validation, and if no few hook-ups were generated among the shelves, then so were no few long-term relationships. I can think of at least three couples who met in LGBT bookstores. Beyond encountering someone you wanted to get to know, how likely it was that you would run into someone you knew. I still remember one Pride weekend when John and I were in the men's bookstore next door to A Different Light. I was looking for dime novels that had been published by an early mentor of mine. I took them to the cash register to find it staffed by someone I knew from college in Pennsylvania. It was an early symptom of gentrification when ADL moved from Hudson Street to Chelsea. That new location was full circle for both the community as Chelsea morphed from a blue-collar neighborhood to the epicenter of NYC gay life, and for me personally as a young writer covering the LGBT beat, who wrote up both the new selling floor and the community movie nights in the basement.

In all of these locations and many more, the humble bookstore, while still a functioning (if, sometimes, barely so) business, became a community center. Three Lives, Pageant Books and Biography Book Shop were cornerstone gathering places for villagers, as are Alabaster, Book Book, and Left Bank. I was never inside Judith's Room nor should I have been, as this women's bookstore was a safe space that I knew about from female colleagues and friends. I was often inside East Village Books, the Saint Marks Book Shop and mosaicbooks, two landmarks of an East Village that no longer exists or only barely does, of rebellion, of beats and goths and punks, of anarchy. In mosaic, I encountered an important beat writer who amused himself for a few minutes by quizzing a young guy with a platinum crew cut and black nail polish to see if he could speak intelligently to writing and jazz. I don't know if I passed the test, but this moment is one I will always treasure as a moment that could only have happened in that place and time. The occult bookstores Enchantments and Magickal Childe were so central to those communities that they provided a setting for Rosemary Edghill's Wiccan mystery series. I won't betray the hidden children by revealing deep details, but I will share this: I have personally witnessed people who entered Magickal Childe as skeptics walk out believing in magick.

Independent bookstores are magical places, but few of us can pretend we didn't haunt big bookstores. Barnes and Noble's flagship store is still an anchor of the flatiron shopping district, where aside from trade books for us numbskulls, many local eggheads stock the shelves with textbooks for their classes. Tower Books became a weekend destination not just for their curated selection but for the vast video store on the main floor and for the street of cheap Indian restaurants a few blocks away. I visited the design- and art floor at Rizzoli's SoHo store to daydream about gorgeous coffee table books (still an addiction) and the lifestyle they contained. And when I got my first straight job in the nosebleed territory north of Times Square, I spent many a lunch hour browsing the shelves at Coliseum, while learning how to manage my thoughts and efforts towards becoming a writer.

Any school librarian knows that a child who picks a book off of a shelf is expressing an inherent interest in a topic, and as librarians are also teachers, hopefully nurtures that moment. As a child, I was equally fascinated by the depictions of homestead life in Laura Ingalls Wilder and by those of the Upper East Side in E.L. Konigsberg and Louise Fitzhugh. I've written before of my connection to my grandmother, expressed in the most practical and poetic way possible by my copies of the Better Homes and Gardens Sewing Book and Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Back in grad school, around the corner from John's and my first apartment, I was delighted to discover a small consignment shop, where I couldn't resist poking through stacks of old home- and design books. These still sit in office as consultants to Urban Home Blog, and were the genesis of the Homekeepers Library that is a foundation of Urban Home and one of its most popular features. Anyone who covers the same beats that I do as a writer and a homekeeper keeps Bonnie Slotnick's bookstore on speed dial. This lovely space on the parlor level of a west village brownstone is a great source for the vintage cookbooks and entertaining guides that I so revere.

Writing this article has reminded me that the stories of gathering places are the stories of lives lived in them. From bar to bookstore, from Mama Diva's living room to the Sanford Meisner theatre, from the Christopher Street piers to the park they became, the story of a New York City that mostly no longer exists is the story of my young manhood. My younger self, the graduate student of goth music and beat poetry, who sewed costumes for cash and then wound up wearing them as a performer, would never have guessed the path my adult life would take. Books and study were constant even as were change and surprise -- even when surprise wasn't really that but was the emergence of what was true all along. Once we could afford to take one, John and I got the guides for our first vacation together at the Traveler's Bookstore in Murray Hill. That was a long time ago, but it presaged the western travels that have become such a part of our life together, and which I will discuss in part two.