Now comes the news that one more notable Manhattan bookstore from that pre-Internet, pre-superstore

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. video one 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 video one 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 video one 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 video one 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 video one 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, video one 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, video one 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. video one But there is nothing online video one 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 video one secret. At times, I felt like I was working for the Medicis, too. Frequented by celebrities, top-name designers, video one 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 video one 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 wo