Flavorwire has compiled a list of 20 incredibly gorgeous bookstores—like the Librería El Ateneo Grand Splendid, housed in a converted theater in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Click over to see the whole post—guaranteed to make you want to visit each and every one. Happy Friday! Further Reading: More amazing bookshelves to inspire (or inspire envy) Coolest bookshelves
New Yorkers know and love the St. Mark’s Bookshop, a stalwart on the Lower East Side. But lately, the bookstore has been struggling to pay the market rent asked by its landlord, Cooper Union. The NY Daily News reports: 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 […]
Yesterday we talked about why Borders’ demise doesn’t necessarily mean the end of books. Great, you may be saying. But where am I supposed to buy my books now? 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 […]
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 […]
Borders filed for bankruptcy on February 16, and the bookselling behemoth will be pulled from the New York Stock Exchange today, March 21. This collapse of the second-largest bookseller in the U.S. hangs like a pall over the entire book industry. Just as the growing interest in digital reading devices has led some pundits to cry that the “death of books” is nigh, some would have us believe that the Borders book bungling is representative of the entire book industry. So how healthy is the bookselling industry really? On the day Borders filed for bankruptcy protection, Publishers Weekly put numbers […]
Abbie Hoffman would be proud. *** 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 […]
