Every year, I try to make sure my birthday week includes visits to bookstores and to Broadway. But 2024 was the first year my friend Margaret and I did an organized “Books and Broadway Crawl,” focused on indie bookstores in lower Manhattan.
Our trip this year included:
· 10.16 miles of walking,
· 3 PATH and subway rides,
· 2 meals (and 1 snack stop),
· 8 bookstores
· 14 books for me (15 if I include the gift I bought for a friend)
· 1 Broadway show
· 1 jar of pickles
· A lot of sweat from the 80 degrees (Fahrenheit) weather
· 3 wonderful friends (in addition to my day-long companion)
· Too many laughs to count
So I figured I’d write a post-Crawl post and provide as many links to the bookstores we visited as I can.
Once we got into the city, I told Margaret my plan to buy one book per bookstore. You’ll see how well I did with that.
Our day started at Bibliotheque (54 Mercer Street), where we had a nice brunch (bacon and egg on a wonderful bun for me, with tea (earl grey, hot … if you know, you know), egg and cheese on a roll for Margaret, and we shared a pain au chocolat as well) followed by some browsing. Knowing my love of all things Macbeth-related, Margaret pointed out a recently released novel called Lady Macbeth, by Ava Reid, which I eagerly grabbed. And I found a hardcover of Peter Beresford Ellis’ Macbeth: King of Scotland 1040 – 1057 in the “rare books” glass cases that was actually not very expensive and so grabbed that as well.
Bacon and egg sandwich, tea, and two books related to Macbeth? The trip was off to a great start! (Interested parties should know that at dinner time, Bibliotheque is also a wine bar, but we weren’t going to be downtown late enough to return…)
We next meandered south/east-ish to The Mysterious Bookshop (58 Warren Street), one of my favorite bookstores ever, anywhere, and one of only three on this trip that I’d been to before, although not in over a year. After some browsing (and picking out a birthday present for a friend), I found Tonight, Somewhere In New York: The Last Stories and an Unfinished Novel by Cornell Woolrich. If you know me, you know that Woolrich is one of those authors I can never read enough of, so buying it was an easy decision. Also picked up an interesting looking mystery by an author I’ve never read before, Kenneth Fearing, called The Big Clock.
Thence it was off to Sweet Pickle Books (47 Orchard Street), where the jar of bread and butter pickles came from. But also Strange Tales from Japan: 99 Chilling Stories of Yokai, Ghosts, Demons, and the Supernatural, collected and retold by Keisuke Nishimoto and translated into English by William Scott Wilson, and Something Nasty in the Woodshed, a mystery by Kyril Bonfiglioli, which I only discovered later in the day is actually the third book in the author’s Charlie Mortdecai series. As with the Fearing book at Mysterious, I bought this based on the cover art and the back cover description, and somehow missed the “third book” indicator on the bottom of the front cover.
The employee working the register at Sweet Pickle heard us mention our book crawl and after we described where we’d been and where we were planning to go, he suggested we visit Bluestocking Cooperative (116 Suffolk Street), NYC’s only queer/trans/sex worker run, employee-owned, bookstore. I only made one purchase there, Bugsy and Other Stories by Rafael Frumkin, but I’m sure I’ll be back for more. (I also made a small donation to their operating fund.)
Thence it was back onto the planned itinerary and off to P&T Knitwear (180 Orchard Street), which after Sweet Pickle I really expected to be selling knitting goods alongside the books. No knitting stuff in sight (although the store’s history connects to a sweater and shirts store in the 1950s), but I did find two books: Tatyana Tolstaya’s post-apocalyptic novel The Slynx and Bolivian author Giovanna Rivero’s short story collection Fresh Dirt from the Grave, translated into English by Isabel Adey.
Next stop was McNally Jackson’s SoHo location (134 Prince Street), which I had never been to. Loved it just as much as the Rockefeller Center location I’ve visited quite a few times (see below). I’ve been meaning to start collecting the British Library’s Tales of the Weird anthology series (because we all know by now just how much I’m a sucker for “trade dress” book series) and decided to finally bite the bullet and pick up Glimpses of Unknown: Lost Ghost Stories and Queens of the Abyss: Lost Stories from the Women of the Weird, both edited by Mike Ashley.
It was time for a breather, something to drink, and a snack. Margaret found Fellini Coffee (120 Thompson Street in SoHo). An iced coffee and Danish for her, an iced chai tea and slice of lemon cake for me, with a water to go … and we were off for our last “lower Manhattan” bookstore.
I’ve been to Three Lives and Company (154 W. 10th Street) several times, and it, like the Mysterious, is one of my favorite indies to visit in NYC. This time, I picked up Don’t Look Now, stories by Daphne Du Maurier (since re-watching The Birds earlier this year I’ve finally be reading an author I’ve previously overlooked) and Rock Crystal, a novella by Austrian/Czech author Adalbert Stifter, translated by Elizabeth Mayer and Marianne Moore, with an introduction by W.H. Auden.
By this point we were ready to not be walking for a while, so we took the subway up to midtown, where we were meeting friends for dinner … but we were an hour early, so we walked over to the McNally Jackson Rockefeller Center location, where I picked up a copy of Sol Yurick’s The Warriors, the novel on which the cult classic 1979 film was based. (It didn’t even occur to me to look for a few more British Library of the Weird titles, even though this is where I first became aware of them.)
Dinner was at Arriba Arriba, one of my favorite Mexican restaurants in NYC (762 9th Avenue) – great food (the fajitas are to die for), great wait-staff. And great company, as I got to introduce my college friends Margaret and David to my writer friends Claire and Carlos.
Then it was time for Margaret and me to head to The Hudson Theater to see Once Upon a Mattress, my review of which will be posted on Thursday.
Lest people wonder why I didn’t visit The Strand, or Forbidden Planet, or The Drama Book Shop: I was at two of the three just a week ago. I picked up a Parke Godwin hardcover I’d been looking for at The Strand (The Tower of Beowulf) and a Macbeth-related script at The Drama Book Shop (macbitches by Sophie McIntosh). And the backpack was heavy enough without also hitting Forbidden or Midtown Comics this trip.
And just to complete the books part of the birthday week: on the Monday of the week, I picked up The God of the Woods by Liz Moore from my local indie, Sparta Books, and on Saturday I paid a visit to Stanza Books in Beacon NY and picked up the new Stephen Graham Jones (I Was a Teenage Slasher) along with Allen Bratton’s modern queer reworking of Shakespeare’s Prince Hal (Henry Henry) and the fourth book in Mick Herron’s Slough House series (Spook Street).
And that completes Books and Broadway 2024! On top of what I picked up at Pulpfest earlier in the month, I have probably TOO MUCH to read … but as a friend often points out, buying books and reading books are two different hobbies.
the birthday week book haul