I had never meant to open a bookstore; it wasn’t some lifelong dream. I was the kid who hid under the cover with flashlights and wrote some angsty poetry in high school. I love books, but mostly I liked the silence, and bookstores were just one of those few places in New York where no one expected small talk.
So when the deli two doors down went out of business and the landlord offered me the lease for cheap, cheap by Brooklyn standards, anyway, I took it. I figured I’d sell a few secondhand books, maybe host the occasional reading, and mostly be left alone.
That was five years ago.
Now this store is a beautiful mess. One half is a curated obsession, and the other half is an accidental storage unit. We have an entire shelf of books with blue covers, a tiny section for “authors who used to work in kitchens,” and a label box that reads “books we regret ordering”. I still dont know how 14 copies of the Latvian cookbook showed up there.
People wander in off the street all the time, some with purpose, others like they’ve been magnetically pulled toward something they didn’t know they needed. One guy came in to charge his phone and left with Siddhartha and a date. Another woman asked for something “fun but existential, like if Nora Ephron and Camus had a baby.” I handed her The Unbearable Lightness of Being. She smiled like I’d just given her her own heart.
There are hard days. A pipe burst last winter and ruined two crates of first editions. The till sometimes doesn’t balance. Amazon looms over us like a smug, unkillable ghost. But then there are afternoons where a stranger brings in a batch of homemade cookies just because “this place feels like home,” and I remember why I stay.
I’m not trying to scale. There’s no five-year plan. If this bookstore survives another year, that’s enough. I’ll keep showing up, unlocking the door, rearranging the display with books I think deserve a second life.
It may not be the bookstore anyone asked for. But it’s here. And in this city where everything changes overnight, that feels like a small act of rebellion.
