New York City’s Little Bookshops Reflect a Variety of Character

All the corporateness, late hours, broad interests, deep passions and garrulousness that make New York City wonderful are reflected in its bookstores, about 750 of them.

Like Paris cafes, little bookshops turn up everywhere--in basements, lofts, around odd corners or tucked into a row of ordinary stores to serve special interests and special appetites.

Each seems to have its own personality. Some have become neighborhood hangouts, others are kind of snooty about their specialties. But every New York reader has a few favorites, and it’s hard to find a bad one.

I love the Argosy Book Store (116 East 59th St. off Park Avenue) with its six floors of old, rare books and maps and, out on the sidewalk, bins of books and prints on sale for $1.

A block north and another east, on the second floor of the French Institute/Alliance Francaise, is Le Bookstore (22 East 60th St.) where you can buy almost anything you want in French, including some easy-reading versions in paperback. English is spoken, but it’s a congenial place to practice your French.

Oriental Influence

The Zen Oriental Bookstore (119 West 57th St. off Sixth Avenue) is less congenial, but has a huge stock of books in Japanese and about the Orient, today and in the past.

I used to enjoy buying my Sean O’Casey at the Facsimile Book Shop on the ground floor of a ‘50s brownstone, where the atmosphere was as fusty as a Barry Fitzgerald movie. The subject was Ireland, from Celtic mythology and the lyric poets to travel guides and current politics. But rising rents forced Facsimile to climb also, to the mezzanine floor at 232 Madison Ave. (entrance on 37th Street.)

As the Irish Book Loft, it’s lighted better and still a good place to learn that Irish culture is more than shamrocks and leprechauns. Alexei, who works there, may be Manhattan’s only Russian with a brogue.

It’s easy to find art books in New York but it’s fun to buy them at Hacker Art Books, on the second floor of an unprepossessing building at 54 West 57th St. (east of 6th). Hacker’s is a floor-to-ceiling, door-to-door agglomeration (the world’s biggest selection) of new, old, rare and out-of-print books on art, archeology, architecture and applied arts.

It has shelves on Africa and Central America, segments on brass, dolls and pottery and a section of European painting that included, at my last count, no fewer than 13 books on or of Degas.

Just reading the titles of the paperbacks in the Hacker hallway feels like Greenwich Village in the ‘20s, Montmartre in the ‘90s, Florence in the 1400s. Up front is a high-piled crib of half-price books and in the middle of everything is a big, old wooden desk deluged with orders from everywhere.

The place looks like a hodgepodge, but the clerks can put their hands on anything you want. “It doesn’t change here,” Linda, the owner’s wife, said. As I was leaving, a harried woman burst in and exhaled relief. “Show me everything you have on Caravaggio,” she was saying as I closed the elevator gate.

Sheet Music, Scores

I get a similar kick from the Joseph Patelson Music House (160 West 56th St., across from the back entrance to Carnegie Hall), which sells sheet music and scores (new and used) to people who are intense about music.

Patelson’s is an old-fashioned, barn-like place with posted announcements of auditions and performances, a scrapbook of recent reviews, pictures of composers on the walls and a selection of books about music and musicians, from dictionaries and encyclopedias to “The Physiological Mechanics of Piano Techniques” and “The Liaison of George Sand and Frederic Chopin.” In back are albums and CDs at discount.

The salespeople, often music students or musicians, are not only informed but concerned. They were out of the Glenn Gould “Bach-Goldberg Variations” on CD. “Take the ‘Partitas’ with Andras Schiff playing,” the salesclerk urged me. “You’ll never regret it.” She was right.

Just down the street (129 West 56th St.) is the Mysterious Bookshop, trading in mystery, crime, suspense, espionage and soft- or hard-boiled detective fiction. It’s a tiny, step-down place, notable for a spiral staircase that leads to the second floor.

Upstairs Spooky

Downstairs is efficiently contemporary with everything from Ellery Queen to Stephen King, even a kids’ shelf with Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. Upstairs is spooky with a stained-glass window, a stuffed raven, horror show posters, improbably high piles of old magazines and a showcase of Sherlock Holmes memorabilia.

At 6 West 32nd St., not far from the Empire State Building, you may elevate to the fourth floor and find Louis Tannen Inc., a complete magic store with lots of books on all aspects of illusion, prestidigitation, ESP and the world of magicians. Children welcome. The store is open till 7 p.m. Thursdays and from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturdays.

All of Manhattan’s ethnic neighborhoods--Chinatown, Little Italy, Harlem, the Lower East Side--offer endemic bookstores: Puski-Corvin Hungarian Books at 251 East 82nd St. near 2nd Avenue, with 12,000 titles in stock for one; Surma (mostly Ukrainian) on East 7th Street near 3rd Avenue for another.

In addition, specific business districts have their appropriate stores or special sections. The Universal Law Book Co. (225 Broadway near Barclay) serves the Wall Street area with a mix of new and used books on law and such related topics as political science, history and business.

The Ballet Shop (1887 Broadway, around the corner from Lincoln Center) carries everything in print about dance and dancers. Morton Books (989 3rd Ave. at 59th Street) is surrounded by home decorating showrooms and specializes in books and magazines on interior design, architecture and fashion.

Intellectual Energy

Around the universities--especially New York University, at Washington Square in Greenwich Village, and Columbia uptown on Broadway at 116th Street--are college bookstores so full of discovery and background that you absorb intellectual energy just hanging around them.

A few general-interest stores are individual in outlook and/or clientele. Womanbooks (201 West 92nd St., corner of Amsterdam Avenue) is a feminist institution with a nationwide catalogue clientele. The store has a children’s play area and a reading table for adults.

On Saturday, opera played softly on a radio as I checked out the excellent selection of popular novels, poetry and literature by and about women, as well as such practical volumes as “In Love and In Business,” “Safe Delivery” and “The Greasy Thumb Auto Mechanics Manual for Women.” There are plenty of of books on feminist theory and women’s history, an excellent collection of children’s books and a big lesbian and gay section.

Back of the shop are postings of women’s political and social events and references for legal, health and financial services. Womanbooks is open till 7 p.m. on Saturdays and from noon until 6 p.m. on Sundays.

Also on the Upper West Side, Endicott Booksellers (450 Columbus Ave. near the Museum of Natural History) may look like all the other yuppie stores on the block, but it stocks fine books and offers free evening readings by authors and poets.

Over at 2259 Broadway (corner of 81st Street) is Shakespeare & Co., another big, busy, browsy general store with lots of special interest sections, late hours seven days a week and sale counters inside and out.

Bookstore for Kids

Across the street (2212 Broadway near 79th Street) is Eeyore’s, my favorite bookstore for kids. The shelves are brightly painted and the carpet is soft, so children (and sometimes parents) can hunker down and leaf through a book. There’s a big, floppy, stuffed eeyore (the donkey from Winnie the Pooh) on the floor and others for sale on a shelf. Salespeople are teachers, ex-teachers or teachers-to-be, and everybody there likes kids.

I look at the posters on the wall--Steig and Sendak, no Mickey Mouse, no Bugs Bunny--and I think the children here will grow up whimsical, kindly and with sharp senses.

A father reads to his son. A woman asks for a book to give to a 3-year-old with a new sibling. A toddler in a stroller turns the pages of a touch-and-smell book. The place is busy, but I don’t mind waiting. (Story readings for 3- to 6-year-olds are on Sundays at 11. Another Eeyore’s, at 1066 Madison Ave. at 81st Street, does Sunday readings at 12:30.)

The Phoenix Bookshop in Greenwich Village (22 Jones St. between West 4th and Bleeker) has reluctantly become a tourist attraction. It’s a quaint-looking place with a stuffed owl and a (non-working) potbelly stove, but it’s also a dedicated dealer in 20th-Century poetry and letters.

“We’re strictly a literary shop,” says Robert Wilson, the owner. Only 10% of the stock is out front. In back are the collectors’ items, including a manuscript copy of a James Joyce poem. While the Phoenix has sold to the King of Denmark, the British Museum and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, the most favored customers are “young college students, just discovering literature.”

Up-to-Date Books

Books & Co. (939 Madison Ave. near the Whitney Museum) has the best, the most au courant books being published, reissued, translated or written about. Behind the countrified paned window and awninged wooden door is an array of books as tempting and accessible as the buffets of some of the nearby French restaurants.

Fiction, memoirs, poetry, essays, the occasional offbeat biography, photography or cookbook will be piled in the Books & Co. window, on the floor, on the oval counter. Everybody stands there taking a gander. In an upstairs room are more books, journals and a comfortable new browsing area. Readings take place there.

“Do you carry Judith Krantz?” I asked the owner, Jeanette Watson.

“We keep a few,” she said. “In case someone asks.”

Jewish Studies

Spring Street Books in Soho (160 Spring St. off West Broadway) is full of current readings, classic literature and big special sections including one of Jewish studies. This store is open weeknights until midnight, Fridays and Saturdays until 1 a.m. and Sunday until 9 p.m.

Across town, in the East Village, the St. Marks Bookshop (13 St. Marks Place) stays open until midnight Fridays and Saturdays and other nights until 11.

Formerly a store with an “alternative life style” slant, the St. Marks has recently become more mainstream, although it still has an excellent social science section in the basement. “We’re less of a neighborhood bookstore,” a salesclerk named Donna says, “because we’re less of a neighborhood. Everybody comes here now.”

The Gotham Book Mart (41 West 47th St. east of 6th Avenue) is tucked into the diamond district but, as one customer put it, “The best gems are in here.” The place has always been a haunt for writers, and the vestibule is posted with announcements of readings, writing groups, contests and new publications.

Inside, Gotham is crowded with young writers and academics. Gotham has an excellent collection of literary journals in the back room, along with current and back-date books and magazines about film.

Philip Lyman, the manager, buys cartloads of old books, so it’s possible to find what you’re looking for at a lot less than you expected to pay.