Exploring Brooklyn's indie, used-bookstores
In the last few months, I've spent time getting to know Brooklyn's bookstores specializing in used and indie books. Plus, Topos in Queens; it's a short walk from Brooklyn's border.
* Last month, I wrote a piece for music blog No Bells about my relationship with artist/band merch from high school and the regrets that followed through today. If you grew up in New York City, or if you are interested in artists that had their roots in New York City, it may speak to you.
Next week, I’ll be included in Los Angeles-based publisher Apogee Graphics’s physical newsletter which will be available exclusively in-person at Printed Matter’s New York Art Book Fair from April 25-28 at 548 W. 22nd Street in Chelsea. Hope you can be there to pick up a copy and read my research into the East Village’s health food restaurants from the Sixties through the Eighties. Till then!
A few weeks ago, my friends and I gathered outside Desert Island, an East Williamsburg bookstore specializing in comics, illustration books, and zines. Next to us are a few circles of people outside and the inside is packed with mostly twenty-something-olds. The square-shaped shop is celebrating its thirteenth anniversary and having a launch party for the latest issue of Smoke Signal, a semi-regular newspaper that comic store owner Gabe Fowler curates with illustrations and comic artists of his choosing. This issue focuses on artists featured in publications in the likes of CLAMP, Jaywalk, and others— different semi-regular comic compilations published by Domino books with contributions from a dozen or so New School and Cooper Union graduates, and others not. My friend Kieran turns to me and says, “Someone is here with their grandma.” There’s an older woman in the corner with thick, circular red frames. Moments later, I see someone turn to their friends and say, “I brought my grandma.” I turn around and someone pulls sketches out of their backpack, and another is flipping through silk-screen prints that Fowler has instructed them to put on a shelf next to other prints for today’s event. I make my way to the front and see my friend Jason. I asked if he'd spun the wheel of discounts already; for the event, there’s a wheel with discounts that range from 5% to 28%. Jason got 21%. I spun it and the arrow was one pin away from 28%, but landed at 5%.
As I leave, I recognize Cameryn, a bookseller I met while he was tabling in Tompkins Square Park with some issues of CLAMP and other underground comics. I asked Cameryn for some help finding the artists behind the Smoke Signal issue; I didn’t know their faces. Before finishing, he turned and introduced me to his friend smoking a cigarette on the stoop, Charlotte Pelissier. I purchased Pelissier’s newspaper-glued zine that focuses on a moment in B&H Dairy. I’d seen her collaborative comics with Mikael Choukroun, another artist who worked on the cover of Smoke Signal. When I ask where he is, she says he’s not here. Much like the underground comics scene, a friend tells me that Choukroun is offline— he has a landline, that will ring forever with no voicemail option. I ask Charlotte to sign the newspaper zine, and she offers to sign for him as well, in absentia.
When I passed through Desert Island a few weeks earlier, Fowler, who was working the front when I passed through, was nothing short of serious about the bookstore’s focus on comics and illustrations. Hearing about the shop’s focus got me reminiscing about St. Mark’s Comics, a comic book store that operated from 1983 through 2019 on St. Mark's before reopening in Brooklyn in the Summer of 2021. But Desert Island isn’t just a comic book store. In addition to the Marvel and DC comics and volumes, you’ll find abstract cartoons and unusual zines in the most noncommercial sense. After picking up one handmade book by the front door on a wood rack, Fowler told me quickly it was published in Italy and who the artist was. Each page felt thick; they had been silk-screened with anywhere from three to four colors; the book’s price was $35.
Fowler opened Desert Island in 2008 after a slew of art handling at galleries including David Zwirner but was inspired to open the comic-specific bookstore because of Chicago’s Quimby’s Bookstore— a zine-haven with its second location next door to Desert Island. Inside Fowler’s shop, you’ll find new and rare books, prints, handmade comics for low and higher prices, some older MAD Magazine paperbacks, and free copies of Smoke Signal. Suffice it to say, the shop is a rainbow of colors and feels like what one might want to hallucinate under drugs.
Before going to Desert Island for the Smoke Signal release, I’d been killing time at Book Thug Nation, a used bookstore that opened in 2009 a little further West in Williamsburg. BTN was started by four former sidewalk book vendors— writer Corey Eastwood, musician Josh Westfal, and writer/musician Aaron Cometbus; Chris Ramos was one of the original four but was replaced a week later by cartoonist Troy Siwan, the only one who wasn’t a former street seller. According to Cometbus, Ramos is still street-selling up on West 94th Street.
Eastwood moved from the East Village to Brooklyn in 2008 after facing too much trouble from the police after street-vending in the East and West Village beginning in 2004. Similarly, Cometbus started street-selling in Park Slope but eventually moved out to Williamsburg after pressure from the police. He recalled going to court for years to dispute the charges. Before opening Book Thug Nation nearby, Cometbus was an employee with Siwan at the late Williamsburg independent bookstore Clovis Press. Since 2009, the collective of vendors has opened other “joint ventures” including Codex, Troubled Sleep, and Human Relations— Cometbus said the group also opened Topos Bookstore and Big Reuse with partners but later handed them over.
Book Thug Nation resides next to a CBD shop and across from a bank-sponsored cafe for co-working purposes. On nice days, BTN has a wooden rack with cheap books for sale outside. Inside there are rugs you’d find at an antique store, and wood bookshelves that line the walls of the shop. Sarah Kirby and Sam Seigel are at the counter, but Sarah is just keeping Sam company while she works. The two are some of the founding members of Deadcrow, an indie comic collective and publisher.
I met Sam and Sarah initially at BTN a few months prior. We didn’t speak until I had walked over to Human Relations to only find them bringing some cheap book racks in, and closing up shop. It was déjà vu. Unfortunately, all of Deadcrow’s issues were sold out in-store, but I picked up a MUSH newspaper on the zine/comics rack, which has no online presence. Human Relations opened in 2013 in Bushwick and sells new, used, and out-of-print books. Extending from the interesting Leftist-minded rare paperbacks and hardcovers you’ll find at Book Thug Nation, there’s a range of topics and interests, and a selection of zines, comics, and newsprint. At the counter at Book Thug Nation, I picked up a book patterned with “Human Relations” on the front and back cover that details stories of shopkeeping and bookselling from the founding owners on the occasion of Human Relations’s tenth anniversary.
At Book Thug Nation crew’s latest venture, Troubled Sleep, I found Cometbus and one other employee, Holden, in the back. The door to their office shelves was filled with contemporary underground comics including CLAMP. When I mentioned MUSH and how difficult it was to find any information about the newspaper online, Holden said his girlfriend Abbie organizes it. On the zine rack, there are some issues of Cometbus’s self-titled zines and issues of Deadcrow comics. Holden isn’t a cartoonist but says they got into it through their friends who are in the scene. I picked out a one-sheet pink-colored paper by Liz Jones that has sprawling writing in little boxes about diners from the East Side and West Side of Manhattan. Cometbus notices I picked it out and to my wondering about its origins, he shrugs his shoulders and says they prefer not everything to have its mystery revealed.
While talking with Cometbus, he asks if I want a cup of coffee. I decline but when I ask if he minds writing down a list of the original owners of Book Thug Nation, he asks again. He says that it’s kinda weird if I don’t. I agree to a cup. It’s maybe 10 minutes to the store’s closing at 7 pm. He brings two diner-style mugs out— one for him and me, both coffee-stained at the rim and asks “Black or cream?”
Not far from Troubled Sleep, there’s Unnameable Books— founded in 2006 as Adam's Books by owner Adam Tobin but changed after the threat of a lawsuit by a similar-sounding book company. The tall shelves and ceilings offer plenty of new and used art and photography books as well as art theory, literature, poetry, and fun children's books. With an impressive inventory of photography books including a signed first-edition of Nan Goldin’s I'll Be Your Mirror (Scalo, 1996), you’re able to flip through pretty much everything, but the prices will be at par with their rarity. No books in vitrines, except a few on higher out-of-reach places requiring staff assistance. In Oct. 2023, Unnameable Books opened a second location in Turner Falls, MA.
At Human Relations, I was close to purchasing one of the $20 international revolutionary music cassette tapes on the counter but realized the great difficulties involved in playing one, without a cassette player. It wasn’t the first social movement cassette tape I’d seen, and felt related to the advent of political cassette tapes seen from artists like Josh MacPhee and his Palestinian mixtapes mixed from his personal records collection and recorded at South Williamsburg / Los Sures’s Property is Theft, aka the PIT, aka P.I.T.
In January, MacPhee held a launch party for the cassettes and an opening for an exhibition of his designed Palestinian liberation posters at the PIT. Jim McHugh, a Greensboro, NC born and raised musician and producer, opened Property is Theft in February 2022. In a video interview a year after P.I.T.'s opening, he described the space as an "anarchist community center funded by our sales of books and records in Los Sures, Williamsburg South Side … that serves incarcerated people by sending books to prisons. We host art shows and music shows. We have an archive of radical books and music that's open to the public…”
Two months ago, I walked into the versatile venue with a few friends before realizing there was a synth performance happening in the back. Outside I saw a PITGOOSE Prisoner Books t-shirt designed by graffiti artist Wombat ICBM in the window for sale; PITGOOSE is a books-to-prisoners program based at P.I.T. that works in collaboration with Mongoose Distro, a New York and Texas-based publishing project that features art and writing by incarcerated people. On my most recent visit, I picked up a Mongoose zine by Comrade Candle where Candle draws a map and a few diagrams of their prison with annotated commentary; I was reminded of Gaston Bachelard’s 1958 book The Poetics of Space which analyses the structure of a home, but Candle’s commentary of the architecture isn’t conceptual prose, it’s literal anecdotes.
McHugh told me at the counter that MacPhee’s Palestinian mixtape sold out after three days. Speaking with him evolved into a 20-minute educational seminar on the IWW or “Wobbles” as they were called. I also learned that the PIT does screenings in the back and across the way at the nearby community garden in the Summer. McHugh could point to a handful of books in the shop that focused on our discussion on labor organizing and the IWW. It felt good to be learning. At the root of a space like the PIT aren’t book sales but discussions and organizing. In my perusing the info-shop— as it is described online— someone came in asking if they were still accepting drop-offs for their migrant clothing drive.
Another bookstore offering clothing drop-off for migrants is Bushwick’s Mil Mundos, a bilingual bookstore with an activist focus. After dropping off a bag of children’s clothes, a father asked “Do you have children’s books?” To which volunteer Leo responded “Oh yeah” and pointed to a large bookshelf with at the top, an alphabet book styled like graffiti tags.
Maria Herron, a former Bluestockings worker/member opened Mil Mundos Books in March 2019, after conceiving the idea at a Woodbine community Sunday dinner in Ridgewood in the Fall of 2018. Herron, a NYC-born Cuban American, started a nonprofit branch of the bookstore, Mil Mundos En Común, in Oct. 2021; the nonprofit is focused on increasing digital literacy and continuing the bookstore’s work leading internet workshops with NYC Mesh, a guerrilla community-focused volunteer-run internet provider, as well as essential goods distribution in collaboration with local mutual aid group Bushwick Ayuda Mutua. Mil Mundos Books offers new and used books in addition to virtual beginner and intermediate Spanish classes and workshops. You’ll find mostly new books with some used, a small selection of zines and independent chapbooks / literary journals, and many free resources for taking like Palestinian protest posters from the People’s Forum and the New York (War) Crimes newspaper by the Writers Against the War on Gaza bloc, a publication that’s been distributed widely at protests.
Entering Mil Mundos Books and the PIT felt reminiscent of entering Bluestockings during its Allen Street days. In different ways, they’ve carried on Bluestockings’ bulletin board with free educational pamphlets, anarchist materials, info sheets, etc. Even without a cafe, the two community-oriented bookshops carried the possibility for in-store banter. There was a couch with some rug space at Mil Mundos, and a bunch of open space in the back of the PIT with some seating against the wall. I didn’t feel pressured to leave. Separate from the other bookstores, the PIT and Mil Mundos don’t sell rare books. Instead, their interests seem to lie in strictly getting their inventory into the hands of the masses. In both, the social movement posters that line the walls seem to scream “These books belong to you, the many.”
While offering rare books, another radically-inclined bookstore The Word is Change, which opened in Bed-Stuy in 2021, offers a variety of topics but most notably is the focus on Leftist politics and counterculture. On their hardwood shelves, I noticed an early printing of the ubiquitous Be Here Now on display wrapped in mylar and a slipcased edition of three Foxfires. Further right on the shelf, I see a plastic-wrapped exhibition catalog of a 1983 "Post-Graffiti" show at Sidney Jais Gallery including Futura, Basquiat, Futura, and Keith Haring— priced at $400.
Specializing in new, used, and out-of-print books, they also sell political posters designed by MacPhee and the bookstore’s proprietor Alexander Dwinell. On my visit, small paper fliers by the cash register advertised a free workshop that evening led by The Art Workers’ Inquiry on navigating employer harassment and discrimination on pro-Palestinian speech. The children’s book section seemed particularly rich, diverse, and progressive in being shelved across three bookshelves with many non-commercial titles with covers that point to race, gender, and class. As The Brownstoner wrote in a feature on the bookstore, the books at the shop support radical social movements.
A couple of Summers ago, I spent hours photographing the covers of my parents’ library as we moved it into storage. These were books that had value, in a financial sense possibly, but ultimately I saw them as family heirlooms. They were relics of the East Village from the 1970s through the 90s. Returning to storage felt like shopping around a bohemian bookstore where I wasn’t under the watch of an annoyed bookseller. I was free to loiter. Inside one book was a bookmark made from a flyer from the 2nd Annual Tompkins Square Park Halloween Dog Parade. There was a zine that functioned as a program guide to a Tompkins Square Park event: “Mañana Presents Avenue B is the Place to Be— Program Guide. Sunday, September 18, 1983.” These books connected me to a neighborhood that I no longer could access. Finding these books felt like someone that understood you but you’ve never met. They were my parents’ books, but more than that, they held value as artifacts from my neighborhood and what was happening. These books understood my personality, my interests, and my relationship to the city.
This is how I felt coming across a copy of While We Were Sleeping: NYU and the Destruction of New York (McNally Jackson Press, 2012) for eight bucks at Topos Bookstore and Cafe, a used bookstore in Ridgewood, Queens. The book is evidence of a community’s fight against the ongoing gentrification by the mega real estate problem of New York University. It contains testimonies made at public hearings by writers, locals, and historians. A worn paperback— the cover lists some of the book’s contributing authors including poet Eileen Myles, next to a silhouette of a water-tower on an apartment building.
Opened in December 2014, Topos is owned by partners Cosmo Bjorkenheim, Anny Oberlink, and Benjamin Friedman. Friedman is the former General Manager of the late St. Mark's Bookshop from 1995 to 2014, and a current partner at Aeon Bookstore, a used bookstore in Manhattan’s Chinatown.
Among Topos’ large selection of used books ranging in literature, poetry, illustration, children’s books, art, and history, there’s a modest size of rare books and a small glass cabinet of pricer out-of-print books. Right off the counter is a stand lined with a selection of zines, new books, and some fun, bright stationery underneath the counter. You’ll find their entire new book inventory at their new second location, Topos Too which opened in November 2023 a couple of blocks away along with a cafe and bar. Some recent in-store programming includes custom glittery resin earplug fitting and children’s reading hour.
Not far from Topos is Molasses Books in Bushwick. Matthew Quinn, a former bookseller street vendor opened the bookstore in July 2012. The shop specializes in used literary books, but also offers a selection of new books, indie chapbooks, and a modest shelf of used art books. My first visit to Molasses was from a friend’s organized poetry reading that packed the inside. The only seats available were the chairs at the entrance for their all-day cafe dining, and the bar stools. At the bar, you’ll find pastries, cookies, coffee, tea, beer, and wine. On my recent visit, I saw a pretty nondescript photobook with the title “Afghan Trucks” that was self-explanatory of its contents— close-ups of artwork details on Afghan trucks. I confused the dated price tag at one dollar for its actual cost, pencil inscribed on the upper right inside page, forty dollars.
Getting to know Brooklyn’s used bookstores, I wanted to learn how sustainable the used bookstore model is. I wanted to know if we can depend on used bookstores in the future. The idea was to meet with someone who knew the ins and outs of the store. On a Wednesday evening, I told Ron Kolm, Manhattan bookshop employee veteran and author of the recently published memoir The Bookshop Book, that I’d meet him at Village Works Bookstore in the East Village, at his suggestion. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Kolm recommended this place given his experiences in New York City’s bookstore scene; he worked at Jim Rose’s East Side Bookstore further East on St. Mark’s Place and also at the Strand alongside Patti Smith and the late Tom Verlaine. We spent maybe twenty minutes at Village Works inside before leaving, and I watched Damian, one of the bookstore’s main employees point out a multitude of literary magazines that Kolm had his hand in the making. It was like watching a ballroom dance where Damian and Kolm, with Damian some decades younger than Kolm, but connected through their equal interest in indie, bohemian publishing. Village Works carries copies of Kolm’s memoir, laid out next to other New York-centric writings and art books right by the store’s window.
Leading up to meeting Kolm, I was intent on seeing if Kolm had any idea of the authenticity of bookstores popping up today and in the last twenty years, given his perspective as a bookseller under the late Strand owner Fred Bass’s management. But sitting down with him as he drank an iced macchiato and ate a side of rice and beans, I quickly realized that he wasn’t interested in theorizing or analyzing the bookshops. Though a history major in college, Kolm’s interest in bookshops was sentimental and personal. At Village Works, he walked around the store, drawn to familiar names like Kathy Acker, Al Diaz, and David Wajnorwicz with whom he had direct, personal contact. My questions on his perspective of out-of-print books and the reality of bookstores today were responded to with stories of amassing as many cheap books as he could in his days at the Strand. His memory of bookstores is encyclopedic where he remembers the managers and owners of bookstores across Manhattan and those who worked at the Strand that later opened their own bookstores. I lost interest or perhaps became frustrated with not getting answers. It seemed like Kolm didn’t have them; instead, he had memories.
His relationship to the East Village wasn’t the clubs— he didn’t identify as a club kid, given the prices of the shows, he says— or the macrobiotic/vegetarian restaurants (Something he also assigns to an expensive scene). But with the authors throughout Village Works, Kolm is remembering another and another and another story about them from his days at the Strand— “It’s in my book,” he says in a way that isn’t so much trying to sell the book but more like he is grateful to have experienced and met these artists.
One of the older bookstores offering used, out-of-print, and new books is located on Greenpoint’s busy Bedford Avenue. Miles Bellamy and Jonas Kyle co-founded Spoonbill & Sugartown Booksellers in 1999. Offering a variety of new hardcovers, paperbacks, known and niche magazines and journals, out-of-print art monographs, stationary, and some odds and ends including filmmaker tote bags and Snoopy stickers. It’s similar to the aura of McNally Jackson in offering stationary, magazines, and books, but Spoonbill offers it all at a local level with its one store. Spoonbill & Sugartown’s audience seems to be broader and more general than the other used bookstores aforementioned; it feels less likely that you’ll end up in a long conversation on the books you’re purchasing there, or with the customers in line. It appears more shop than book.
Growing up in the East Village, I visited the bookstores that were old institutions like East Village Books, Mercer Street Books, the Strand, Alabaster Bookshop, and St. Mark’s Bookstore before closing in 2016. As I got older, I learned about the new (mainly) art bookstores popping up in the neighborhood like MAST, Karma, Codex, and Printed Matter on St. Mark’s; often it felt like there was a clear distinction between the young art bookstore-going customer and the paperback-seeking older East Villager— both may be obnoxious or polite in their own right, but only the former will entertain shopping where the latter shops, not the other way around. I know plenty of my older neighbors who would (and maybe should) judge me on some books I purchased with the excuse “It’s rare!” But with the times, workers of the past seem to be starting new ventures— keeping some of the old and bringing the new.
Francisco Hernandez left managing Union Square’s used and rare bookshop Alabaster Bookshop to open leaves in the Summer of 2022. Hernandez’s bookstore specializes in used books with a range of cheap paperbacks to older, collector-sought-after out-of-print books like a $750 first edition Joan Didion novel. Inside you’ll find stacks of books throughout the store, shelves lined, a vitrine of rarer books, and a pretty rich collection of photography and art books. Near the front are small wooden boxes of contemporary magazines and zines, and an assortment of early 20th-century family album photo prints and unknown wedding Polaroids for sale.
When Hernandez, seated at the back of the bookshop in a swivel office chair, heard I was researching used bookstores and owners, he responded by saying that owners like himself are the least interesting thing in the whole scene. I should be looking at the book scouts instead, he tells me— the people that come in with bags of books to sell.
During my visit, Bill Hall, the soft-spoken owner of High Valley Books, a nearby appointment-only bookshop in Greenpoint, came in with a red, metal-wired cart. The two talk shop about their bookselling friends, and Hall loads his cart with books that Hernandez has set aside. I asked Hernandez and bookseller/friend Ariel to give me an idea of their customers. People are always looking for “beach reads” Hernandez tells me— a book that they can read on their trip to the beach. It’s that or coffee table books, he says. I noticed a couple of feet from him, near the counter, a blue milk crate on a stool with a sign on the front that reads “$10 art books.” When Hall complimented Hernandez’s collection of interesting older paperbacks and out-of-print editions, he responds “I’m not an edition fetishist, I just like how they look.”
Francisco is cognizant of the history of used bookstores like his alma mater Alabaster— which catered to the taste of older white men who owned these stores. He gestures to his employees, saying that the bookstore is meant to encapsulate other people’s interests, which include young people. My friend Ariel tells me they’ll try to take everything from people donating. I ask if that means by genre or price. “Both,” she says. Before I leave, a young woman in a hoodie comes in and makes her way to the front and asks Francisco, seated in the desk chair leaning forward on the chair back with his stomach, facing the store’s front. He’s penciling in prices on the first pages of new inventory. “You take donations?” She pulls out a thick, bright blue book from her bag. Francisco nods and after she leaves, he asks Thirteen, another bookseller at the shop, and Ariel if they smell anything on it. “Smells like Bath and Bodyworks,” Ariel responds. Francisco goes to shelve it on the hardwood bookshelves.
At the shop, Ariel told me about filmmaker Jason Rosette’s documentary Bookwars (2000) which focused on the West Village street booksellers of the late Nineties. While Rosette’s documentary proved to be very controversial among its subjects, Rosette— a bookseller himself in the documentary— brought to attention the struggles street vendors face with limited inventory, space, and intensifying city regulations. In one scene, the sellers realized that encasing a book in mylar and plastic— out of touch— made a book appear more valuable, allowing them to price on the higher end. Some common problems faced by the vendors were books that sat on their fold-out table without selling, customers just reading through books without buying them, and then the cops— a problem, especially for the Black booksellers on Sixth Avenue who are filmed in one scene with their book inventory being seized by the police. An ex-bookseller told me that homeless booksellers sought out Sixth Avenue as a place to sell because they had the heat from the subway grate keeping them warm. After researching the fates of the booksellers featured in the documentary, it seemed two found formal bookselling venues in the city or upstate in a store, or starting a shop of their own.
Watching the documentary, I was reminded of Jen Fischer, who recently retired in January from bookselling outside Tompkins Square Park after nearly nine years, and how many times I’d run into her and then other times, expecting her to always be there. She was my introduction to the street bookselling scene. While sad, the Bed-Stuy & Bushwick bookshop Better Read Than Dead seems to be a good example of what can be in-store for street sellers after their tenure. David Morse, Matty D’Angelo, David Robinson, and Hadley Gitto— four former street booksellers— opened Better Read Than Dead in March 2014 after having met outside the Morgan L stop, tabling since 2012. They operate a variety of locations including a garage and cafe in Bed-Stuy and their flagship shipping-container stall named “Book Row” in Punk Alley in Bushwick. [Editor’s note: On 4/18/24, Better Read Than Dead announced that “Book Row” will be handed off to the store’s former managers Sara & Griffin as its own entity, but BRTD will continue to supply stock.] Specializing in used books, they offer a range of cheap paperbacks, interesting political and social commentary printed matter, pamphlets and zines, and rare out-of-print sought-after copies. They may be most known for their recent sales of the late musician Tom Verlaine of the band Television’s book collection.
On my way to the Burley’s Coffee location, I entered two other cafes in a block radius thinking it was Burley’s given the strikingly similar vibes apparent in the cafe. I almost embarrassed myself asking, “Where’s the books?”
When you find it, the Burley’s Coffee location offers a smaller selection of Better Read Than Dead’s large inventory; inside you’ll find a wide range of their more inexpensive used copies, a small selection of art books, and a modest-sized vitrine of more expensive, rare out-of-print books. When the coffee machines shut down at 3 pm and computers are no longer allowed, it’s a nice relaxing space to browse a bunch of nice paperbacks. I overheard one conversation about a birthday party that took place at the shop.