They’re all gone now, but when I moved to New York, in 1991, the city seemed to be nothing but bookstores. I’m sure there are others for whom the city was nothing but banks or museums or night clubs or restaurants, but for me all of those were secondary to the bookstores. I spent my first few days in New York traipsing among them, looking for work and feeling awed. Those myriad palaces of the printed word were my first index to the varieties of literary life in Manhattan. Each store excited me in its own way, and I can still recall them. Scribner, with its shimmering stained-glass front and gilt lettering, was all Fifth Avenue splendor. The scruffy, secretive Gotham Book Mart, on Forty-seventh Street, was a rough in the diamonds, a hoard of the obscure and beautiful. Endicott’s expansive, red-carpeted floor space, glossy black shelving, and attractive, turtlenecked salesgirls came close to my idea of heaven—the New York of my dreams. The refined, uptight, and brainy Books & Co., on the Upper East Side, was way out of my league: you couldn’t get upstairs without a degree in semiotics. Coliseum, floored with linoleum and lit with fluorescent, didn’t feel like a bookstore at all but more akin to a discount shoe warehouse or a wholesale beverage retailer—you went there to buy cheap or in bulk. Shakespeare & Company, huge and overstuffed, wood-filled and bursting, seemed to be the corner store for the entire Upper West Side.
Now comes the news that one more notable Manhattan bookstore from that pre-Internet, pre-superstore era may join the list of the departed. The Times reported on Tuesday that the building at 31 West Fifty-seventh Street that houses Rizzoli’s flagship store will be demolished, along with two neighboring structures, to make way for a new tower. Rizzoli, which first opened on Fifth Avenue in 1964 and moved to its present location in 1985, plans to look for another spot, but the prospects don’t seem good for a bookstore—even a high-end bookstore—in midtown. It feels like this old friend is being put on life support. Once the preserve of the big bookstore, the grid between Bryant Park and Central Park is now left with only Posman, the wonderful, pocket-sized bookseller in Grand Central Terminal; a single Barnes & Noble near Rockefeller Center; and Kinokuniya, whose stock is mostly in Japanese.
Though I submitted applications to Endicott, Books & Co., Gotham, and the rest, none save Rizzoli offered me a job. I started as a clerk on September 15, 1991, and worked at the store until June of 1994, eventually rising to the position of merchandising manager and buyer. That’s three Christmas seasons, each of which I remember like a case of food poisoning after a great meal. “Libraries raised me,” Ray Bradbury famously said. Rizzoli did much the same for me. It was my first New York mentor, the place where I learned about so many of the things college didn’t teach me. I had come confidently, cockily to New York to be a writer, but in the light of the store’s Diocletian window, I was soon made aware that I was an ignoramus. Rizzoli introduced me to Egon Schiele, Keith Haring, Palladio, Robert A. M. Stern, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Diane Arbus, Cindy Sherman, and the music of Jacques Brel, Charles Trenet, and Paolo Conte. In those carpeted aisles I first read the words of Montaigne, Dante, and Italo Svevo. The store and its senior staff also schooled me in the ways of the city, the constant combustion of commerce, art, status, desire, work, and play that drives New York.
Many of the things that Rizzoli offered its customers (and its staff) are now easily obtainable online: international periodicals, European popular music, and books in foreign languages. But there is nothing online that will replace the ambiance of the place. With its vaulted atrium, marble flooring, and wood-panelled shelving units, Rizzoli looked like the private library of a Medici prince, the sort of place where an Umberto Eco character would hunt down an ancient secret. At times, I felt like I was working for the Medicis, too. Frequented by celebrities, top-name designers, wealthy New Yorkers, and foreign businessmen, the customers were, to say the least, demanding. The proximity to prominence—Hey, isn’t that Uma Thurman over there? Look out, Lagerfeld just walked in—and the baroque décor helped to compensate for the poor pay, the short lunch breaks, and the occasional verbal abuse from those we served. During my years there, Madonna, Michael Jackson, the Queen of Thailand, and Elton John all dropped in. Oriana Fallaci had an office on the sixth floor and would storm in and out as if war had just been declared. We learned to affect nonchalance in the presence of such glamour. When David Bowie came up to the register one afternoon, my colleague Lara Tomlin (now an illustrator whose work has appeared in The New Yorker) looked at the name on his credit card—David Jones—and quipped, “Hey, weren’t you in the Monkees?” (For the record, Bowie was a good sport. He laughed.)
The store hosted plenty of big parties and book signings. Pavarotti and Avedon both drew crowds that went out the door and down the street (so did the Italian pop icon Eros Ramazzotti). But the encounter I treasure most was much more intimate. Not long after the Everyman’s Library put out handsome new editions of “The Bottom of the Harbor” and “Joe Gould’s Secret,” Joseph Mitchell came in to sign our stock. While signing the books, he regaled half a dozen of us on range of topics: oysters, North Carolina, James Joyce, and Ian Frazier’s recently published piece on Canal Street. Mitchell died two years later, but, having spoken with him, I can still hear his voice whenever I read his books. It is for such interactions that people become booksellers.
During the eighties and nineties, Rizzoli expanded, opening stores on the West Coast and in Dallas. At its peak, the chain had fifteen locations. In addition to the flagship store in midtown, there were three others in New York City: in the Winter Garden of the World Financial Center, on West Broadway in SoHo, and a store-within-a-store at Bloomingdale’s. To compete with the arrival of Barnes & Noble and Border’s superstores across Manhattan, Rizzoli began selling a lot more non-book merchandise—T-shirts, scarves, watches—but it held on to its core business in the visual arts and design. Eventually, like the rest of chains of the time, Rizzoli withered until only the first store remained.
After leaving Rizzoli, I, like several of my colleagues, went on to become a librarian. Other co-workers graduated from Rizzoli and embarked on careers as artists, designers, architects, lawyers, and teachers. In some way, the store propelled us all into our futures. Years after leaving, I began going to a dentist’s office on Fifty-seventh Street, about a block east of the store. I looked forward to my biannual cleanings because afterwards I could stroll down to Rizzoli and browse both its stock and my own past. Every time, as I approached from Fifth Avenue, I worried that the store might not be there, but always I would catch sight of Old Glory and the Italian Tricolor aslant on their poles outside and I would feel relief. But that won’t be true for much longer.
Heraclitus, one of the few celebrities who didn’t shop at Rizzoli, said the only constant in life is change. Nowhere is this more true than in New York, a city ever remaking itself. It is for that reason that New Yorkers are prone to such nostalgia. Would we value Grand Central Terminal as much as we do if Penn Station had not been obliterated? Rizzoli’s thirty-year run at its Fifty-seventh Street location is a more-than-respectable showing in the convulsive annals of midtown retail. If nothing else, its potential disappearance should remind us to value the many magnificent bookstores that the city still boasts: Three Lives, Book Court, McNally Jackson, Word, Word Up, and Book Culture, to name a representative handful. The migration of bookselling to Brooklyn, uptown, and Jersey City follows the flow of the city’s literary life. Only the ghosts of bookstores past remain in midtown.
Photographs by Linda Pricci/Rizzoli.
