Local Bookstores Weather Virus

By AllISON RAPP

A typical day at Community Bookstore in Park Slope, Brooklyn involves a steady stream of customers — some on the hunt for a particular new release, others just browsing the shelves, looking for their next good read. Some stop by to simply say hello to the store’s resident feline staff member, Tiny,whose popularity has earned him a loyal following on Instagram.

An unpretentious, mid-sized store, Community Books has lived up to its name and become a community-based regular spot for locals since opening its doors in 1971.

But there’s been nothing regular about the last eight months, as co-owner Ezra Goldstein can attest to.

“Like most other store owners, we went back and forth all through early March,” he says. “As the seriousness of the pandemic became clear, and as we considered the risks staying open posed to customers and staff, we decided to close the store.”

And so Community Bookstore shut its doors on March 20 and an immediate sense of uncertainty hit. They applied for and received a Payroll Protection Plan loan, which helped ensure the security of the staff’s jobs.

“We laid off no one,” says Goldstein. “We’re very proud of that.”

Not all New York City bookstores have been quite as fortunate. Even The Strand, arguably the city’s most famous book shop, laid off employees at the start of the pandemic, despite also receiving a PPP loan. Last month, they revealed revenue levels had dropped almost 70 percent and that permanent closure seemed imminent.

“I’m going to pull out all the stops to keep sharing our mutual love of the printed word,” the owner, Nancy Bass Wyden, wrote
in a statement. “But for the first time in the Strand’s 93-year history, we need to mobilize the community to buy from us so we can keep our doors open until there is a vaccine.”

Ultimately, The Strand received an influx of customer support, enough to keep their doors open for the foreseeable future, but this is a unique case, notes Goldstein.

“We are in a different situation from the Strand,” he says, “which is so dependent on tourists and other shoppers from outside their neighborhood. Though we’re still shipping books around the country, the heart of our business remains neighborhood and event driven.”

With wealthy, large-scale companies like Amazon eating up much of the market, it can be difficult for independent sellers to keep up, or even keep afloat at all. In August, the New
York Times reported that over 2,800 small businesses — around one third of all small businesses in the city — had shut things down for good, a number that’s almost certainly increased since.

The bright side is that many local neighborhoods have risen to the challenge of saving these companies. For Community Bookstore, an onslaught of online and curbside pick-up orders have allowed the owners to be hopeful for the time being — even shipping both nationally and internationally.

“I kept waiting for the bottom to fall out and would have moments of enormous concern, but the orders kept coming,” says Goldstein. “I am enormously grateful to our regular customers for their support, but we get many, many orders from people who had never shopped with us before, and also from people all around the country.”

Of course, this isn’t a permanent solution, but for now it’s sustainable. Goldstein says that the shop is unsure of what things will look like come holiday gift-giving season, but hopes that Community Bookstore will still be providing not just books to their customers, but also a sense of hope and connection through the long winter months.

“We think of books as great engines not just
of pleasure but also of continuing lifelong education and of increased sympathetic understanding of our fellow humans,” he says. “And we think of ourselves, humbly, as contributors to neighborliness, the sense of community, that helps us all get through tough
times. We love mixing with our customers, even in these limited times, and think some of that feeling is reciprocal. We can’t wait until it’s safe enough to welcome people back into our store.”

Photo by Freddie Moore