The co-owners of the book shop, Terry McCoy and Bob Contant, are set to meet with the school’s officials Wednesday to discuss a rent reduction.

The last time the two sides met, in early 2010, Cooper Union was unwilling to budge on the rent, which has increased to $20,000 a month.

And the New York Times covers the deep sacrifices the owners have already made:

To cut expenses, both owners have halved their salaries and started collecting their Social Security benefits, rather than waiting until they turned 70, as planned. They laid off all eight of their part-time workers and reduced the five full-timers’ hours to 25 a week. Still, without a rent cut, they said, they could not survive. They have no interest in adding a coffee bar or moving to another neighborhood. Where would they go?

Want to help? Sign a petition asking Cooper Union to lower the rent for St. Mark’s Bookshop. The goal is 45,000 signatures, and the bookstore has already collected over 41,000–an indication of the love its patrons feel for it and the importance of the shop in the community.

Well, for new books, consider your local indie bookstore—you can find one near you on the IndieBound website. But there are also amazing used bookstores out there.

First, here’s a video on Brazenhead Books, a speakeasy-like (illegal) bookstore in NYC with a secret location—you can read more about them in the New Yorker, too. (Via.)

There’s No Place Like Here: Brazenhead Books from Etsy on Vimeo.

(By the way, owner Michael Seidenberg echoes MobyLives’ argument from yesterday: “People say, oh, did Barnes and Noble put you out [of business]? No, real estate put me out.” If you missed that post, read it in our blog archives.)

Next, here’s an amazing time-lapse video of Half Price Books filling a new bookstore (via).

And finally, here’s a video about Almost Banned in Harvard Square Booksellers, a used streetside bookstore—and Cambridge landmark—run by the homeless Ken O’Brien.

Borders may be a thing of the past, but does it mean there’s no market for books anymore? The MobyLives blog of Melville House does some pithy analysis:

Was this whole thing basically a fifteen-year-long advertisement for Amazon?

In a word, no. The story of Borders failure is, first and foremost, a real estate story. Simply, Borders gobbled up a lot of expensive square footage in the real estate boom of the nineties, as did Barnes and Noble, with a seemingly insatiable lust that curdled into craven predatoriness. [...] When the economy imploded in 2008, they were locked into severely overpriced space, out of dough, and with a bunch of dunderheads running the show.

It’s that simple. And that tragic — with Borders vaporized only after they put hundreds of independent bookstores out of business, we realize anew why there are laws against monopolies and predatory practices, and how little our government cares about enforcing them. Meanwhile Borders also contributed greatly to the fact that the culture is now mired in a devalued concept of the book, which is that it’s a thing that only matters if it sells hundreds of thousands of units.

That’s the real tragedy, according to MobyLives. (Be sure to read the full post here.)

Image credit: Flickr - The Ewan

So how healthy is the bookselling industry really?

On the day Borders filed for bankruptcy protection, Publishers Weekly put numbers to how much Borders owes just some of its top debtors:

Publishers are now on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars, led by Penguin Group (USA) which is owed $41.1 million, followed by Hachette at $36.9 million, Simon & Schuster at $33.8 million, Random House at $33.5 million, and HarperCollins at $25.8 million.

But while that news demoralized many, on February 15—just one day before Borders declared bankruptcy—Publishers Weekly ran a very brief and very different news clip: “Bookstore Sales Fell 1.4% in 2010.” Citing preliminary estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau, the article reported that the total bookstore sales for 2010 equaled $16.50 billion. Yes, that’s billion. So while the headline seemed ominous, it could well have read: “Bookstore Sales Hold Steady, Slip Just 1.4% in 2010.”

For the record, the “total bookstore sales” included anything and everything that might go past the register at a book store, including calendars, greeting cards, notebooks, magazines, digital reading devices, and more. But to put all this in perspective, according to several sources, the movie industry pulled in $10.65 billion in ticket sales last year. That’s just about $6 billion less than 2010’s bookstore sales.

Image credit: Flickr - Susan NYC

The national perception about books and reading might actually begin to change if publications such as Publishers Weekly begin publishing less melodramatic and more honest headlines such as “Bookstore Sales Outpace Movie Ticket Sales By Nearly $6 Billion.”

In the meantime, what are writers themselves going to do to demand that this self-perpetuating cycle of negativity be broken?

***

In Harvard Bookstore, one of my favorite local indie bookstores, there’s a small, unobtrusive sign on the fiction shelf. For books by Bukowski and Kerouac, it says, please ask at the register. I couldn’t figure out why and finally asked one of the staff. “People tend to steal them,” she explained bluntly.

As a horrible goody-two-shoes, the idea of stealing a book had never occurred to me. (And really? Charles Bukowski and Jack Kerouac? Okay, I do live in Cambridge.) In the New York Times, novelist Margo Rabb investigates the most-stolen books at independent bookstores across the country:

Fiction is the most commonly poached genre at St. Mark’s Bookshop in the East Village of Manhattan; the titles that continually disappear are moved to the X-Case, safely ensconced behind the counter. This library of temptation includes books by Martin Amis, Charles Bukowski, William S. Burroughs, Raymond Carver, Don DeLillo and Jack Kerouac, among others. Sometimes the staff isn’t sure whether an author is still popular to swipe until they return their books to the main floor. “Amis went out and came right back,” Michael Russo, the manager, told me.

Reasons for stealing range from a rite of passage to “hipness” to good old-fashioned inebriation. And gender seems to play a role, too: Rabb points out that most frequently stolen books tend to have male authors–and male thieves.