Hello, friends! Here is the latest edition of the blog’s weekly feature “Read in NYC.”
This week, we toured around the East Village and visited bookstores in its vicinity. The East Village retains a lot of historic sites, such as Newsboys’s Lodging House, Lenin Statue, and more. Having a long history, the neighborhood also boasts of having a lot of old bookstores that are constantly loved by New Yorkers. Whether you are planning on visiting the East Village or just looking for a bookstore to visit in your neighborhood, you came to the right place. Here are some of the bookstores I’ve visited this week:
LEFT BANK BOOKS
If you’d like to experience a bookstore like no other, I strongly recommend “Left Bank Books” located on Perry Street. The bookshop, which originally operated in the West Village for nearly 25 years and closed in 2016, reopened after three years in Spring 2019 in its new Greenwich Village location. The entire store is a tiny studio, remarkable for its museum-quality exhibition. The oldest book in the store is “THE PRIMA DONNA. HER HISTORY AND SURROUNDINGS FROM THE SEVENTEENTH TO THE NINETEENTH CENTURY” by Edwards, Henry Sutherland which was published in 1888. I also find the first edition of “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” by Virginia Woolf which costs $100 and a signed copy of “Tropic of Cancer” by Henry Miller. Since most books, which are priced from as low as 20 dollars to 6000 dollars, are exhibited on a white book shelf like art works, you will find many literary works visually charming.
THREE LIVES AND COMPANY
Located on West 10th Street between Bleecker Street and Hudson Street, Three Lives and Company opened in 1978. Michael Cunningham, a winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, said about the bookstore: “One of the greatest bookstores on the face of the Earth. Every single person who works there is incredibly knowledgeable and well read and full of soul. You can walk in and ask anybody, really, what they’ve read lately and they’ll tell you something — very likely something you’ve never heard of. [But] it’s always going to be something interesting and fabulous. I go there when I’m feeling depressed and discouraged, and I always feel rejuvenated.” Even in my first visit to Three Lives and Company, every word Cunningham said was proved to be unelaborated. As I entered the store, I saw a staff member chatting with a customer, who looked like a regular, about their new books and tidbits about their lives. Despite its small space, the store is full of many books organized by genres. For anyone looking for a cozy and company-loving bookstore, I recommend this place.
MERCER STREET BOOKS
Open since 1990, Mercer Street Books & Records is known as one of favorite bookstores of many famous figures such as Drew Barrymore, Susan Sontag, Tom Stoppard, and Jim Holt. One notable feature about the store is that its floors are covered with out-of-print, rare books and you will see books piled from the floor to close to the ceiling. At first, you might be overwhelmed with many books in the store. However, you will soon be able to navigate through piles of books that are organized by many subjects. On the storefront, it says a quote from Mark Twain: “The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read.” I believe there is an advantage of reading rare, interesting, and esoteric books that Mercer Street Books offers. If you are planning on visiting Mercer Street Books, be ready to “lose yourself in old school Greenwich Village.”