Books on Broadway (and other places)
Anna Goodall scurries about an overheated New York in search of a cool corner, and finds a few enticing bookshops along the way
New York, New York, it’s a helluva town,
The Bronx is up but the Battery’s down
The people ride in a hole in the ground.
(Comden & Green)
Yep, it’s true. I step out of a building on Broadway between East 22nd and 23rd, almost right opposite the Flatiron Building, and into the sweltering air. A girl said the night before in a bar, ‘It feels like standing right next to a bus engine sitting in traffic, all the time’ – and she’s right. So why is it still the best place to be, even in 98°F?
The first thing that happens is two Mediterranean-looking boys catch my eye and smile; I smile back. So what? I think nothing of it, but as I thread my way down Broadway’s diagonal trunk, cutting across Union Square and then on to various bookshops along the way, I realise they are following me. But in a funny way, like a film, like a lousy cheap gag in a bad romantic comedy from the eighties: every time I go into a shop, they wait outside and look in the window, but when I come out they turn away and pretend they’re not there! (Definitely not New Yorkers, then.)
And there are ‘characters’ everywhere who, to the movie-fed English, seem to have walked straight off the silver screen and on to the streets. Back on 22nd/23rd, where I first surfaced from the dislocated calm of air-conditioning, I find my path blocked by a thick-set, tanned man with a craggily groomed face and an expensive baby-blue shirt, who was chain-smoking and very distinctly talking business: ‘I told you already… this is a positive thing. Positive. I don’t wanna hear anything else; I don’t wanna hear any of this crap.’ On and on the same. Then a bit further down, on the corner of 20th, a fat pasty lady in a bright floral sack is standing, oblivious, in the middle of the sidewalk like a damp spot, saying loudly into her phone, ‘Mawd? Mawd? Is that yew, dear? It’s Vivien. Viv-i-en!’
And when, thirty-six hours later, the heat finally breaks in a thrashing storm, running three blocks to get to the restaurant when our cab driver has dropped us way too far away, my friend pretends to be jostling with a hand-held camcorder as we run through the streets with the wind rushing down the avenues and debris whipping past us and people screaming, excited and scared. ‘It’s exactly like Cloverfield!’ he shouts as we all laugh and gasp with excitement. (And it probably is, except I’ve never seen it.)
But despite all the cinematic potential of NYC (and the nagging suspicion that dogs the enthusiastic visitor as they stalk the streets: could they just possibly be walking through an actual film?), for me, it really comes alive in books – think almost anything by Salinger, American Psycho or the work of Paul Auster. This city is an intellectual, a smart city with a natural love of culture, and it’s the bookshops (as well as quite a few other shops, I’d have to admit) that I really love about New York.
The first one you come to out of Union Square is probably the most famous. Strand Bookstore has been around since 1927 and claims to contain eighteen miles of books, which doesn’t seem such a wild figure when you actually get there: there are three floors of new, used and review-copy discount tomes. I’ve always found the shop assistants on the snooty side, but the books more than make up for it. (The Art section upstairs is particularly good.)
But I can’t quite forget my Italian stalkers eyeballing me through the plate glass, so I get out of there pretty fast, and trip a bit down Broadway to Shakespeare & Co. at 716. It’s that curious beast, an independent chain, but it’s brilliant all the same, and the one on Broadway is probably the best of the bunch thanks to a wonderfully calm atmosphere, and great mix of first editions, unusual new books and bestsellers. (Plus the assistants are lovely.) I pick up an instantly desirable copy of The Dead by a small New Jersey-based publishing house, Melville House Publishing, which seems, having looked at their website, to put out a lot of interesting new writing, fiction and non-fiction (and to accept submissions).
Emboldened by my first purchase (and still hoping to lose the weirdos), I pretty much double-back on myself by heading uptown to one of my favourite diners back on Union Square and then over on the west side of Broadway to Skyline Books at 13 West 18th Street. This is a beautiful shop where any bookworm worth their salt will feel right at home: it’s cheap, a bit of a mess, smells strongly of old books, and it’s got some faintly odd people rattling around inside. (Plus I’m sold on its tag line ‘Books, rare and well-done’.) I don’t get anything rare, but instead pick up a copy of Nabokov’s singular autobiography, Speak, Memory, in one of those cool, slightly seedy late-sixties editions, and a brilliant edition of Naked Lunch, replete with its very own earnest (but well-considered) inscription from someone or other on Friday July 14th, 1967: ‘To read it is to be slapped in the face – with REALITY.’
Buzzing with excitement, I scuttle back through the square and on to Broadway, pretty sure I’ve lost the stalkers, for whom the long hot trek back from where we’d come and the fustysmelling Skyline were clearly too much! I walk all the way back down and soon I’m crossing over Broadway on to Crosby Street, on the East Side, heading for the Housing Works Used Book Café at 126: ‘45,000 new, used and rare books and records in a classic library setting’ – and all the money goes to Aids and HIV charities. You can’t really go wrong.
OK, that’s it. I’m done for, just about. After Housing Works, I’m so hot and tired and desperate to find somewhere with air conditioning in which I can sit down and relax, I make a beeline for the nearest café and flop out to feast on my finds, despite having barely scraped the surface of the bookstores in NY.
Just one last note, in the cool of the evening, strolling about in the West Village after dinner (as one does), I come across the Left Bank Bookshop. At that late hour I had to be content with peering hopefully in the windows, but it looks absolutely brilliant. Sadly I didn’t have time to return the next morning, but a look on their website has whetted my appetite: higgledy-piggledy, it specialises, as was clear from the window display, in first editions. One for my next trip then.
Strand Bookstore
www.strandbooks.com
Shakespeare & Co.
www.shakeandco.com
Skyline Books
www.skylinebooks.com
Housing Works Bookstore Café
www.housingworksbookstore.com
Left Bank Books
www.leftbankbooksnyc.com
