Shakespeare & Co. To Open New Stores in NYC, Philly

The old Shakespeare & Co.
on Broadway (via Yelp)

Independent bookstores in New York City and elsewhere experienced a fatal period from the late 1990s through the early 2010s. A number of the iconic (Gotham Book Mart, A Different Light,  St. Marks Bookshop, Left Bank Books, Coloseum, Barnes & Noble flagship, etc.) and less well known indies and mini-chains (Posmans, Bent Pages, 12th Street Books, New York Bound Books, Revolution Books, Book Court, etc.) in the city shuttered their doors, sometimes with the promise or at least hope of reopening, and, as was the case with St. Mark's, eventually doing so only to close their doors permanently. Between the assault by larger chains, the exorbitant rental prices, the dip in readers, and other problems, the once bookstore-rich has become a comparative desert over the last 25 years, though some indie bookshops, like McNally-Jackson and Greenlight Books, and chains, like the financially precarious Barnes & Noble have hung on.

One survivor, now under new ownership, that is now on the verge of expanding is Shakespeare & Company. After having shrunk to a single store, its 939 Lexington Avenue space next to Hunter College on the Upper East Side, the holding company that took over the lease for the remaining store and bought its trademark in 2015 now plans to open two new Manhattan stores, one on the Upper West Side at 2020 Broadway (between 69th and 70th Streets), and a new one in the West Village, at 450 6th Avenue, near 11th Street, in what was the old Jefferson Market. Both have planned openings in the fall of 2018. Alongside these new stores, S&Co. also will open a café right outside the Hunter-68th Street 4/5/6 (Green line) train station, at Lexington Ave. and 68th Street. As the press release notes, the UWS store is a homecoming, since the first Shakespeare & Company opened in that neighborhood in 1982 and closed in 1996, but the West Village store will also be a significant return for the bookseller, since its Broadway storefront next to NYU's campus also had a major following up through its closing in 2014. (Other branches, in Brooklyn and on 23rd Street, had also disappeared.)

That branch was one of the first to carry my first book, Annotations, and it also is where I met the Canadian poet, director and intellectual James Oscar Jr., now in Montréal. He worked there, and we used to have long, illuminating conversations about literature, life and everything else. One other significant component of that old Broadway branch was its section featuring British imprints, which it updated and sold at reasonable prices. This is hardly a big deal today, when you can order books from almost everywhere in the world and get them in a reasonable amount of time, but in the mid-to-late 1990s, it was tough to find any bookstores, including most in NYC, that had British versions of US-published books, as well as rare finds that weren't available anywhere else, on the bookshelf. I can think of a number of volumes, including editions of novels by J. G. Ballard, Will Self and Peter Kalu, and several anthologies, that I found there and nowhere else.

The old Shakespeare & Co. on
Broadway, in Manhattan (via Yelp)

In addition to the New York openings, S&Co. plans to open a Philadelphia branch as well, in the Rittenhouse Square area of Center City, at 1632 Walnut Street. This will be the company's first store outside Manhattan. All the stores will have an Espresso Book Machine, which are produced by On Demand Books, a sister subsidiary to Shakespeare & Co. headed by CEO Dane Neller. McNally-Jackson currently has an Espresso Book Machine, which allows visitors not only to print published books on demand, but also self-publish books as well. S&Co. is already experimenting with customizable children's books, and will feature some of the self-published works near the Espresso Book Machines. I've watched books being printed up and have done so once myself at McNally-Jackson, and I find the process and machinery spell-binding. I think it may be a possible way to get Seismosis, now completely sold out and thus out of print, back into readers' hands (at far less than the $50-$100+ it now sells for online.)

One worrisome note is S&Co. CEO Dane Neller's comment that "My vision for Shakespeare & Co. has always been to create the biggest little bookshop in the world." (You can find a longer interview with Publishers Weekly here.) I understand the expansive dreams, but haven't we seen this before, with disastrous results on multiple levels? I immediately think of Barnes & Noble, which became a behemoth and drove many smaller chains and indie stores out of business, only to fall prey itself to an even more massive beast, Amazon, which has undercut bookstores and retailers of all sorts and continues to grow with abandon. Perhaps I'm reading too much into Neller's comments, but I sincerely hope that as the company grows, it takes into account the broader publishing and literary ecology. Jeremiah's Vanishing New York, which covered the closing of the Broadway store, features a brief, positive interview with Neller about the new stores.  My fingers are crossed that this will all work out!

Espresso Book Machining with DR's Prez + The Novella Is Back

On the web, it's a truism that one thing leads to another...and so, somehow or other, I ended up at the Harvard Crimson website, and came across this brief video interview, on the Crimson's FlyBy blog, with Leonel Fernández Reyna, the President of the Dominican Republic, who was visiting the US a month ago, and happened to stop at the Harvard Book Store to, as he said, load up on books, particularly nonfiction ones. While there, he got to see an Espresso Book Machine (EBM), this one named Paige Gutenborg after its Fall 2009 rollout, in action.



I've been waiting to see and try out one of these print-on-demand machines, another option in the transforming book world, since I first read about it Joseph Epstein's book The Book Business a few years ago. According to Adrian Versteegh's article in the March/April 2010 Poets & Writers, Epstein and Dane Neller co-founded of the New York-based company that debuted the EBM four years ago, and the company

has entered partnerships with the Open Content Alliance, Lightning Source, and Google Books, giving users access to over three million titles, both proprietary and public domain. The "ATM for books," as Neller describes their device, has so far been installed at about twenty-eight locations throughout North America, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Africa, including the University of Michigan, McGill University, and the University of Melbourne. On Demand expects the EBM—which sells for slightly over a hundred thousand dollars, depending on the choice of printer—to have found its way into at least forty independent bookstores by the second quarter of 2010. 

Versteegh notes that so far, universities and their presses, and self-publishing authors have been the major users of such machines, but sales have been low, and for the vanity system, a stigma remains. (As the large, traditional publishing conglomerates vanish, how much longer will this be case?) He adds that most of the books produced by these machines aren't in bookstores, and most readers are encountering POD-ready books online, via Amazon and online publishing organs like Lulu and iUniverse, though given that this is increasingly the way most readers, especially in the US, are coming into contact with books. If more of these machines and databases featuring out-of-print, hard-to-find and rare but desired books become available, it would be a boon for writers and publishers, especially those that focus on the "long tail" approach. Another way of looking at such machines is that a book never need go out of print now, and, should one not have access to an e-reader and want a print book, one can hold one in no time.

Speaking of bookstores, Barnes & Noble, the largest bricks-and-mortar book retailer, is planning to hock itself. With the rise of online bookselling and the popularity of e-readers like the Kindle and the iPad's iBook app, I figured this was coming sooner or later. (Is anyone buying Barnes & Noble's Nook?)  Will one response be the return of small, independent booksellers in some cities, as the Wall Street Journal article above suggests? Is this the twilight of the bookselling conglomerates?

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Speaking of books, Taylor Antrim writes in a recent The Daily Beast piece that that beguiling but unloved creature of the American prose fictional world, the novella, is making a comeback. (English 394 students, all of whom have written at least one by the time you graduated, take note!) Sort of. This makes sense to me especially now that people's attention spans and leisure habits (and time) are changing (if not shrinking) to a sizable degree because of digital technologies. Or so some researchers suggest. My own experience, I should say, bears them out.

In addition to Melville House, the novella-focused, Brooklyn-based publisher of old (Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol) and new (Tao Lin, Imre Kertesz) short novelistic works, and New Directions, which has been publishing novellas for years, including under its Bibelot line and now in its $10 Pearls line, bigger publishers and a number of contemporary authors are getting into the act. Takeaway quote:

But it's not just a pair of small presses championing an underdog form. Even the major houses have proved themselves surprisingly novella-friendly (though they seem to prefer the more approachable term “short novel”). Scribner gave us Don DeLillo's wispy thin Point Omega in February and Ann Beattie's Walks With Men (July) is the most sneakily intelligent read of the summer. No, novellas don't score blockbuster sales—even Stephenie Meyer's new Eclipse novella The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner from Little, Brown put up disappointing numbers in its first week—but they're around, people are writing them (see also Ian McEwan, Rick Moody, Nicholson Baker, newcomer Josh Weil, and others), and they're a reminder in a digital age that a printed book need not be a cumbersome relic. I can slip Walks With Men into my back pocket on the way to the park. A Kindle? Not so much.

Antrim goes on to ask what a novella is. His answer: a pretty short novel that need not be heavily plotted, though neither does a long or very long novel need to be.  He also cites Tao Lin's Shoplifting from American Apparel, a delightfully sad little enigma of a book,  to say that any two of its pages might not stand out, but the cumulative effect is significant, which one should extrapolate to novellas in general. In a short story, of course, any two pages had better stand out, since they might constitute the entire story; in a novel, any twenty pages might not. Antrim ends by discussing Jean-Christophe Valtat's 03, the new French sensation I cannot claim to have read, but which I've read a great deal about. It's a lyrical novella about a suburban teen who empathizes and falls in love with a developmentally disabled girl, which sounds all wrong....