Petitions aren't enough to save a bookshop "(from itself)"?
Choire Sicha at The Awl has got some possibly contentious views on the campaign to save St. Mark's Bookshop. He's even calling himself a Libertarian on this one. The petition, which we helped circulate last week, has widely made the rounds and was at 13,574 signatures at last count, out of 15,000 needed for presentation to landlord Cooper Union. Sicha is dismayed by the armchair reaction, and looks at the bookshop as being rather passive:
I love this book store in particular, I love bookstores in general and I also love physical books and... listen, this is just not how leasing or New York City or business works.
I encourage you petition-signers to go to your own landlords—during the first quarter of the lease that you just signed—and ask for a rent reduction. See how that goes. Yeah. If the bookstore wants to become a non-profit bookstore, let's file that paperwork and do this thing. (I'll help!) But this odd public-private partnership "public good" conception of a commercial business is giving me the willies a little. (Cruel of me? Maybe! Libertarian? Ugh, possibly. I know.) It is a public good, technically! It's a great thing! But if you're not keeping them in business and I'm not keeping them in business... well, something's broken, right?
It's also disconcerting that the owners of the bookstore are unrepresented. Just like in court, in real estate the man who has himself for a client is represented by a fool, or however that dumb saying goes. Get a pro bono lawyer and a pro bono commercial broker, price your options and be prepared to break your lease if Cooper Union won't help you. Posturing in public as "we're almost too broke to pay our rent, won't someone please help us" just makes it obvious to your landlord that you probably can't even afford to move out. The bookstore, despite its radical background and all-around utopian terrificness, is a business and it owes it to itself to act like one. It also deserves proficient allies that'll help it survive. Now let's all stop signing Internet petitions and go buy a book.
His commenters thus far seem in agreement, with one saying:
I find the petition a little weird too, and I count St Mark's as a formative bookshop in my young booknerd years.
I went in there the last time I was in the neighborhood, specifically because I knew they were hurting financially, ready to drop some cash. (Which I did, though less than I'd expected to.) I noticed a couple of things while I was there.
1. The stench of failure is, I'm sorry, already hanging over the place. It was nearly empty on a weekend late-afternoon, and the cashier thanked me profusely for my purchase.
2. Comparing it to other NY bookstores I frequent, I was struck by how very little it has changed since I haunted the stacks 15-20 years ago looking for the hot new literary theory titles. But back then you HAD to go to St Mark's, because online commerce didn't exist, or was not as omnipresent.
It seems to me like the best bookstores that have survived or come of age in this new era have evolved ways of keeping themselves destinations - everything from coordinating bookgroups to delivery to onsite author events to discounts to book clubs that order through them. Compare McNally Robinson, or Greenlight, or even the Strand, for God's sake, to St. Mark's, and ask yourself if this institution, which LET ME BE CLEAR I would miss bitterly were it to vanish, can really say that the landlord is the heart of the problem here.
Contradictory feeling aside, we can all agree to buy some books, yeah?
(Also, the NYer weighs in)