From The Huffington Post:
At the tail end of last year, the New York book community was hit with unsettling news. BookCourt, the independently run store serving Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, Brooklyn Heights, and readers willing to venture from their own neighborhoods for the sake of author events and stocked shelves, was closing.
For avid readers, the loss of a bookstore leaves a mark. Bookstores ― the brick-and-mortar variety ― foster so many chance encounters and reflective moments; true love of the glue-and-paper sort blossoms among their shelves. And, a shuttered indie doesn’t bode so well for the looming Bezospocalypse, even if their sales are increasing at a steadier-than-average clip compared with non-indie vendors.
But, like magic, the closing of BookCourt coincided with the announcement of another store, to be opened by Emma Straub, author of Modern Lovers, The Vacationers and Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures. A onetime BookCourt employee and longtime lover of literature, Straub hopes her store will be “salve for the wound.”
. . . .
When did you decide to open Books Are Magic!?
The second that we heard that BookCourt was closing. Which was mid-October. We found out earlier than most of the public in the neighborhood. Immediately, we thought, no, no, this can’t happen. We live a few blocks away from BookCourt, and we’re there, I would say, three or four times a week. I truly couldn’t fathom the notion that we would live in a neighborhood without an independent bookstore.
We know ― oh, yeah, this is our job to fix. So, we’re working on it.
In your announcement you highlight the importance of a bookstore to a community or neighborhood. How, in your experience, have bookstores played that role?
I work from home, and for me a bookstore is a place that I can always go. It’s a place I can go to find new ideas, and see old friends, and to read a poem, and to pick up a picture book for one of my children, and to buy a gift. Books are the only presents that always fit. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a book and thought, oh, god, this is just, the wrong thing.
Even when I don’t buy something, I always fondle a lot of things. As a writer, bookstores have been enormously important to me. BookCourt in particular, but also other independent bookstores across the country. There’s nothing like it. There’s nothing like a bookstore. It falls in a certain in-between space, between public space and private space. Bookstores always feel intimate but welcoming. I think they’re important and necessary for people like me who have small children, and where it’s not always warm outside. It’s nice to have a place to go.
Link to the rest at The Huffington Post and thanks to Dave for the tip.
Yeah. It’s called “the implosion of Barnes & Noble”
Book fondling again. I didn’t even know it was a thing.
I don’t know about the fondling, but I like the sniffing.
Have you tried book licking? I hear the binding glue is very tasty. 🙂
The silverfish poop? Not so much… 🙁
Yet another “avid reader” who seems never to have entered a library.
Sigh. The reason BookCourt lasted as long as it did was that the bookstore owners also owned the building. Which they sold for a smidge under $14 million dollars. Heaven knows what you’d need to charge for rent on retail space at street-level to even begin to recoup that in ROI terms, but I’m guessing it would be a bit more than most bookstores could afford.
This fact is reported nowhere in that piece, and it gives an indication of the retail environment into which Ms. Straub is trying to open her bookstore. For which she has not yet found space, begun accumulating inventory or apparently done much besides add a page to her blog and conducted a few interviews. (If she’s established an LLC or corporation I’ve not seen that, either.) She is also a full-time author and has two young children, I believe both under the age of five. Color me skeptical that she’s planning on treating this as a full-time gig.
Her father Peter is the horror writer. Which strikes me as kind of apropos for this venture, but, eh, I’ve certainly been wrong before.
I’ve come to the conclusion that to be an trad-pub author nowadays, one must give up one’s ability to do math. — Mary McKenna
This is one explanation.
She says she has “initial funding” and is “hammering out a lease”. One hopes, for their sakes, that they have run ALL the numbers all the way out to break-even.
When they say they have hope/belief/faith they can make it work — that’s the time to start slowly backing up and make for the exit. And she’s doing it not because she sees a market, but because she thinks the neighborhood ‘needs’ an independent bookstore.
Another HuffPo unicorn dreams.
But, but… unicorns are real. And beautiful, too.
Oh, wait… 🙁
The ones I’ve seen last for years are also game shops.