rfmcdonald | [URBAN NOTE] "6 Independent Bookstores That Are Thriving

Boris Kachka and Joshua David Stein blogged for New York magazine the experiences of six independent bookstores in New York City that had survived. The key seems to be an ability to make the bookstore a community space, not even necessarily a book-related community space, and to just hang on.

The doors closed Friday on the beautifully vaulted century-old space that houses the Rizzoli Bookstore, only the latest in a long line of midtown book emporia whose steady mass extinction seems to so handily showcase the Death of Print. Just two weeks ago, the New York Times ran a front-page story specimen blaring the headline “Literary City: Bookstore Desert.”

That story probably drove a small flood of sympathetic customers to Manhattan’s endangered booksellers (St. Mark’s Bookshop, Bank Street Bookstore, and maybe certain branches of Barnes & Noble). But alarmist rhetoric aside, it was a familiar tale: Not about the end of reading, but about New York real estate — inexorably rising rents and the few businesses that can afford them. It’s a challenging landscape for anybody, but probably especially challenging for bookstores after all. The same Department of Labor database the Times cited, showing a nearly 30 percent decline in Manhattan bookstores between 2000 and 2012, also found Brooklyn actually gaining a bookstore (from 50 to 51) in the same period. Look closely at a few of those — as well as Manhattan’s hardiest survivors — and the city’s Darwinian, post-Bloomberg ecosystem begins to look less like a literary desert than a harsh but productive driver of bookstore evolution. Here’s how a few of the success stories have managed.

Walk the line between indie and superstore. That gloomy Times story was pegged to Sarah McNally abandoning plans to open an Upper West Side outpost of McNally Jackson, her decade-old, large-for-an-indie shop in Nolita. But McNally will have you know that, first of all, her rent is already completely astronomical (though she won’t say what it is), and second, she’s doing just fine. She attributes more than $4 million in sales last year to an obvious factor: volume. “Instead of getting rid of shelf for display,” she says, “we’ve gotten rid of display space for shelf space.” So 65,000 books have been squeezed into 7,000 square feet (along with a café), while creative organizing keeps them compulsively browsable. “I always try to make a bookstore that on the surface is extremely welcoming to all types of readers,” she says, while conceding, with a sly mock apology, that she sometimes neglects big new books: “You won’t find a lot of cheerleading for the frontlist, for which I’m sorry to the publishing industry.” In the fall, McNally will indeed open a new outpost — in Williamsburg. —Boris Kachka

Chase philanthropic support. Brooklyn’s most notable new arrival — call it the 51st store — is Greenlight Books. Jessica Stockton Bagnulo, a former events coordinator for McNally Jackson, decided to open her own bookstore in the teeth of the 2008 crash, which hit publishing particularly hard. But her plan won a Brooklyn business contest worth $15,000, just as the Fort Greene Association revealed the results of a local survey: The No. 1 service residents most sorely lacked was a bookstore. The trade group contacted Bagnulo — already in talks with her current partner, Rebecca Fitting, a sales rep at Random House, who was ready to kick in $50,000. They held a gathering at BAM (Colson Whitehead and Jhumpa Lahiri showed up) to solicit community loans, which eventually added another $75,000. Then they landed $150,000 from the World Trade Center Small Business Recovery Fund. They also got a rent break on prime Fulton Street — $5,250 for 2,000 square feet, soon to hit the near-market rate of $7,500. The annual double-digit growth since comes down to curation, engagement, and location. Greenlight became an official merchandise vendor to nearby BAM, which led to a more aggressive strategy of pursuing offsite sales. They’ve organized a new reading series at St. Joseph's College, which hosted Gary Shteyngart in January and will soon feature best sellers Elisabeth Gilbert and Khaled Hosseini. They’ve even hired someone specifically to handle offsite events — 3 percent of the take as of last fall, but a growing part of the business in a city without a lot of square footage to spare. —B.K.