Here is New York

The dearly departed Coliseum bookstore...

I work very near The Time Warner Center in one of the epicenters of Manhattan, one of the most populous places in America, and yet there is no place to buy a book in the neighborhood.

I was thinking about that just before Christmas when I wanted to buy someone the cult classic “Time and Again” by Jack Finney, one of my all-time favorite books about New York. It wasn’t until then that it hit me — there are no bookstores anywhere near where I work and I work in MANHATTAN!  There used to be a great Border’s bookstore in the Time Warner Center but that’s closed. There used to be a spacious Barnes & Noble bookstore over near Lincoln Square but that closed. There was the dearly departed Coliseum bookstore on 57th Street and Broadway but that’s so last century.

With all those big boys gone, there was nowhere for me to buy a book. I thought hard about the closest bookstore in an area that has tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of people, passing through it every day. The best I could come up with the Rizzoli bookstore a good walk away on 57th Street but it carries mostly art books and it’s not a general interest bookstore. Other than that, there is the Barnes & Noble on W. 82nd and Broadway and the Barnes and Noble on Fifth Avenue around 45th Street which, you know if you live in NYC, is a very far walk.

And it’s not only NYC. Recently I happened to be Beverly Hills on business and went for a long walk around my hotel which was near the Rodeo Drive. I walked at least five blocks in almost every direction and, while I could have bought virtually anything else, there was not a bookstore to be found.

All this is not news of course what with e-readers taking over the world but it is sad that, even in Manhattan — one of the most literary places in the United States, it’s sometimes tough to find a bookstore, never mind a good bookstore. My supposition is that the big boys are not going to make it but that small, independent bookstores like the ones where I live in Brooklyn (Word, Greenlight, Book Court or McNally-Jackson in Manhattan) will succeed by becoming combination bookstores and neighborhood gathering places….at least I hope that will be the case.