Broadway Book War -- A Reader's Guide

The New Yorker Bookstore, on 89th Street around the corner from Broadway, reflected an individual style of book-selling in the 1970's. The ground floor was essentially a newsstand, the first place I purchased the gloriously lubricious East Village Other as well as high-toned works like Paul Krassner's Realist.

Behind the cash register, a rickety staircase led past a poster of Humphrey Bogart holding a gun that seemed to follow customers in a manner that might have been meant to deter shoplifting. At the top, a haphazard collection reigned floor to ceiling in two tiny rooms and a few alcoves connected by aisles so narrow as to compel one-way traffic. The store was not user-friendly but book-friendly; it died in 1982.

A further step on the evolutionary ladder of Upper West Side bookselling, was Shakespeare & Company, at Broadway and 81st, founded in 1981. It, too, specializes in new books, and has wider aisles than the New Yorker did, reachable shelves and posters provided by publishers to advertise their tomes like "The Culture of Desire" that get noticed in this establishment. Shakespeare's stocks periodicals, although they are more likely to be the Times Literary Supplement than the late East Village Other.

At the current peak of this great chain of being, a Barnes & Noble has just opened, spanning Broadway from 82d to 83d. Stock analysts call this a "category-killer" -- a carnivorous monster that feeds on lesser entities. The New Yorker Bookstore would have been a mere appetizer for this behemoth, and so, the fear is, will Shakespeare's. Hearing cries of unfair competition and consumerism run amok in the hallowed precincts of the text, I wonder.

The helpful flacks at Barnes & Noble say that not only will no one suffer but that their new store will encourage book-buying in the neighborhood. Independent book stores worry that it will drive them under by virtue of superior purchasing power and lower prices.

The questions asked in literary society from Lincoln Center to Columbia are: "Shall I go? Should a moral person drink a cappuccino and accept a tainted discount?" Since I'm as incapable of not entering a bookstore as an iron filing is of eluding an electromagnet, I will go. Guiltless, I may even sip a mocha latte. I'll certainly buy remainders, because Shakespeare's doesn't carry them. But that's avoiding the issue. The more pointed question is whether I will give Shakespeare's $2.12 more than Barnes & Noble charges for "Rameau's Niece."

There is, of course, another option, the street book sellers -- not the ones who pilfer from book shops and here and there lift cartons from warehouses and from the trucks delivering merchandise to Shakespeare's and Barnes & Noble but the fellows with the gray blankets spread with rain-sodden paperbacks or their more ambitious peers with folding tables set up and deconstructed daily.

Most writers prefer little guys to big guns. My favorite vendors include the ex-academic at Columbia's 115th Street gate who will on request whip Christopher Caudwell out from under Truman Capote and discuss his influence on Lukacs as well as the fellow, long since evicted from the sidewalk at the New York Coliseum, who specialized in children's books deaccessioned by public libraries. I bought a broken-spined copy of Robert Graves's "The Green Book" there, not only illustrated but signed by Maurice Sendak. Barnes & Noble's children's corner can't top that.

These new marketeers can compete financially, too. Whatever cost-effective rent Barnes & Noble negotiated for its 32,000 square feet still can't match the rent for nine square feet of sidewalk at 111th and Broadway. And whatever deep discounts a category-killer can demand from publishers still don't match residents' donated duplicate editions of Conrad's "Secret Sharer."

There are three tables staffed by three different homeless men between 72d and 73d Streets, each of which has, in addition to a folio of magazines with titles like Babes in Arms, two mint copies of Eric Van Lustbader's meretricious best-seller "Zero."I won't buy any, but appreciate their existence. Is this an example of collective buying? Or did the author, en route to a CD-buying binge at the nearby HMV, spontaneously drop off a few copies to the less-fortunate?

Whatever the reason, this is precisely the thrill I want -- that anything may come my way. I bought, for example, a beautifully bound anthology of selections of The Journal of Irreproducible Results -- mock scientific exercises with titles like Umbrella Disappearance, Exchange and Loss Rates in American Academic Libraries. I love the serendipity -- not the book I intended to buy but the book I realize I can't live without the second I see it.

Lechters, the houseware chain's emporium on Broadway near 112th, offers idiosyncratic bookselling at its best. The store has decided to stock one novel among its pots and pans: Paul Auster's "Moon Palace." This is because the store inhabits the space once occupied by the Chinese restaurant of that poetic, lunar nomenclature. The dumplings are no longer, but their aura -- like that of better books in paper at Shakespeare's, on remainder at Barnes & Noble and in uncorrected galleys on the sidewalk -- remains.

What I'm saying about Barnes & Noble is that I'm not sure that more is better. Better is better, and better books are what there ought to be more of. We live in a society that does not read -- and is consequently less likely to write -- books, at least. Blockbuster Video, every one of whose celluloid products presumably originated in print, makes Barnes & Noble look as quaint as the newsstand entry in the New Yorker Bookshop.

That's the real war on Broadway, between the tattered remnants of a literate population and the hordes of Cynthia Ozick's sadly ascendant "aural culture" -- the listener-viewers as opposed to the readers. Nevertheless, and despite the odds, books are written and occasionally published, purchased and read. And there you have several miracles, first among them the wonder of a three-dimensional volume where black squiggles on white paper create worlds.