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St. Mark's Bookshop was an independentbook store, established in 1977 inNew York City'sEast Village neighborhood. It was the oldest independent bookstore inManhattan owned by its original owners. The shop, run by proprietorsBob Contant and Terry McCoy, specialized incultural andcritical theory,graphic design,poetry,small presses, andfilm studies—what theNew York Times called "neighborhood-appropriate literature".[1]It featured a curated selection offiction,periodicals andjournals, including foreign titles, and included unusual-for-bookstores sections onbelles-lettres,anarchists,art criticism,women's studies,music,drama, anddrugs.[2]
The store, named afterSt. Mark's Place, its original location,[3] closed on February 28, 2016, due to rising rent[4] and mismanagement.[2]
The Third Avenue location featured small press poetry books, among others, in the front and had a table with expensiveart books and aninformation desk in the back. There was also an "X case," a section of selections next to the information desk where the books that were stolen the most were kept, works byCharles Bukowski andWilliam Burroughs,[2] and, at one point, aconsignment section.
Its first location was at 13 St. Marks Place. This space had amezzanine level that ran along the shop's right side. The owners were wooed away from this location to below a Cooper Union dormitory on Third Avenue andStuyvesant Street[5] by the then-vice president of Cooper Union for lower rent. (The point of the lure was the development of theGreen Building on the east side ofThird Avenue between Sixth and Seventh Streets.)[2]
It made a great deal of money in the 1990s and 2000s, especially on weekends. Former employee Margarita Shalina wrote in 2016 that at this time, "it was flush with money." Some of this was due to the popularity of its expensive art books.[2]Jacques Derrida was known to have visited, as well asDaniel Craig and a drunkSusan Sontag.[2] Other visitors includedMadonna andPhilip Glass,[5] and when the store started to accommodate speakers,Slavoj Zizek andMichael Moore.[2]
At one point, the store manager retired and his replacement focused on book returns and reordering titles from wholesalers. Shalina describes "books were cycling through the store without being given a chance to sell, sometimes at as little as four weeks. The scale on which we were doing this was ridiculous and no one seemed to take freight into consideration." She also described how ordering became "for the most part, unregulated and unbudgeted." Records were not kept, and "the manager would habitually delete the sales history of books."[2]
In 2011, St. Mark's Bookshop's financial problems became evident, exacerbated by the high rent. Anonline petition, started by a patron of the establishment, asking that the store's landlord,Cooper Union, reduce the rent, garnered over 40,000 signatures.[6][7]In August 2012, over $24,000 was raised in an online funding drive.[8]Cooper Union, in the meantime, had been beset by financial woes of its own: Historicallytuition-free, the administrators started chargingtuition in the fall of 2014 to try to make up for lost endowment income.[9]
In May 2014, the store announced plans to move from 31Third Avenue to a smaller space at 126 E. Third St; their new landlord was theNew York City Housing Authority.[10]Though Clouds Architectural Office was commissioned to design its new space,[11] declining sales over the years made the store unable to afford the rent at the new location.[12]An auction was held to raise funds to cover moving expenses.[13]
Independent bookstores have a long history in New York. Other examples includeThe Strand,Westsider,McNally Jackson,Shakespeare & Co, WORD, Longitude,Bluestockings, andHousing Works and inBrooklyn,powerHouse,BookCourt,[14][15] and Greenlight Bookstore.These stores and small chains have been feeling competitive pressure from the larger chains, internet-based booksellers, anddigital media.[16]In an attempt to be competitive with electronic media, St. Mark's andOR Books engaged in a joint venture where OR Books sold their electronic media via the St. Mark's website.[17]
Even some of the larger chains, such asBorders, have been unable to remain solvent in the face of competitive pressures from web-based stores ande-books.[18]
Past employees of St. Mark's Bookshop include playwrightAnnie Baker, artistWade Guyton, poetRon Kolm, writer-performerJulie Klausner,[19][20] and writer-translator Margarita Shalina.[2]Previous to founding St. Mark's Bookshop, owners Bob Contant and Terry McCoy both worked at8th Street Books and also atEast Side Books.[21]
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