The Death of Rizzoli Bookstore

On Friday night, I met up with several friends on Fifty-seventh Street, for Rizzoli Bookstore’s final hour of business. All of us were onetime employees of the store, drawn together to commemorate the imminent demolition of that building, a landmark from our youths. It had been some time since I had gone to a bookstore funeral, but in the nineteen-nineties I was a morbidly regular attendee at going-out-of-business sales for numerous storied Manhattan bookshops. Part wake, part bargain hunt, and part keepsake quest, those events were like estate sales for beloved but distantly related cousins; the atmosphere was a distinctive combination of guilty discovery and mournful nostalgia.

From those necrobibliophilic clearances, I had gathered a small cache of memorable volumes. At Endicott, which closed in July of 1995, I turned up two early collections of poetry by Ciaran Carson, “The Irish for No” and “Belfast Confetti.” A year later, I delved among the mortal remains of Shakespeare & Company’s Upper West Side store, briefly considering buying one of the bookcases (all of which were for sale) before settling on a hardcover copy of John Demos’s “The Unredeemed Captive.” In 1997, at Books & Co., I purchased a copy of Wendy Cope’s “Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis,” which is, to this day, my favorite book of light verse. That year, I also attended the final day of business for the New York Bound Bookstore, which occupied a space in the lobby of the A.P. Building, in Rockefeller Center. There I acquired, at a steep discount, Henry R. Stiles’s three-volume “History of the City of Brooklyn.” (New York Bound, I recently discovered, has since been reincarnated online.)

I still own all of those rescued books. Their status as survivors has made them immune from the regular cullings I perform on my library. But, by the time that Gotham Book Mart and Coliseum Books expired, in 2007, I had fallen out of the carcass-picking habit and was well enough into middle age not to need the reminder of the evanescence of everything I hold dear. A line from Carson’s poem “Turn Again,” written about the city of Belfast, applies just as well to New York: “Today’s plan is already yesterday’s—the streets that were there are gone.”

There had been a last-ditch petition to obtain landmark status for the building at 31 West Fifty-seventh Street, but the Landmarks Preservation Commission had ruled that, while the building dated to 1919, the baroque interior, installed in 1985, when Rizzoli moved there from its Fifth Avenue location, was not old enough to warrant landmark status. Earlier on Friday, there had been a demonstration to protest the store’s closing. In an eloquent gesture, the Rizzoli staff had placed a photograph of the old Penn Station in the display window, along with a quote from Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis:

Is it not cruel to let our city die by degree, stripped of all her proud monuments, until there will be nothing left of all her history and beauty to inspire our children? If they are not inspired by the past of our city, where will they find the strength to fight for her future?

With all that in mind, I was curious to see what people were buying, and I was also somewhat overwhelmed by the prospect of choosing something to stand for the three and a half years that I had spent at the store—not to mention the decades-long friendships that I had begun while working there. Even in its final hour of business, there was still a tantalizing and sumptuous array of titles available on the picked-over shelves, all for forty per cent off the cover price. What should I select? An autographed deluxe limited edition of Kanye West’s “Glow in the Dark,” for two hundred and twenty-five dollars? A gorgeous history of the electric guitar, which came packaged in its own guitar case, for fifteen hundred dollars? Or a remaindered copy of a Rizzoli Publications monograph on Michael Graves, for a mere twenty-two dollars and fifty cents? Others were having the same difficulty. I overheard one woman, straining under an armload of merchandise, exclaim, “I love books too much. That Greek-vase book—I had to tear myself away.”

I had to tear myself away, too. I had hoped to be there when they locked the door for the final time, but at seven-thirty, the normal closing hour, there was still a line of more than twenty people waiting to buy their bargains and their keepsakes. Dozens more customers were still browsing the aisles. My former colleagues and I made our way out the front door, where scaffolding was already in place for the coming destruction. We posed for photographs, watched other customers get interviewed by local television news reporters, and decided that it was high time for a drink.

In a nearby saloon, we unveiled our purchases. My friend Dai, once an aspiring folksinger and now digital librarian, presented a copy of “Bob Dylan: New York.” Lara, an artist and illustrator who used to decorate Rizzoli’s windows, took a pragmatic approach, purchasing Dave Stockton’s “Own Your Game,” a book about golf, for her husband. Antoinette, who now works as a product designer, outdid us all, buying three books: “When Fashion Danced,” by Stephen Burrows; “Avant-Garde Bags,” by Pepin van Roojen; and an Italian-language edition of “Intervista,” by Oriana Fallaci. That final choice was a lovely touch, I thought. Fallaci’s office was for many years situated above the store, and she was a regular, if often unappeasable, customer. As for me, I opted against a book. Instead, I bought a canvas Rizzoli tote bag. I had long coveted one of those bags while working there, but had always hoped to get one for free. Now I happily handed over the twenty-six dollars. After all, I need something in which to carry the memories.

Photograph by Jackson Krule.