#fourth ave.

[newyorkthegoldenage]

Men browsing the outdoor tables of a Fourth Avenue bookstore, 1959.

Photo: André Kertész via Museum of Contemporary Photography

[newyorkthegoldenage]

For around 70 years, Fourth Avenue between Astor Place and Union Square was lined with used bookstores. At their peak in the 1920s, there were nearly 50 of them.

The first stores opened around 1890 and soon began to attract others. They were dim, scruffy shops stuffed to the gills with old books, full of that old book fragrance. Most did not sell antiquarian or valuable stuff, but more like the curated contents of attics and thrift shops. Most had bins or carts outside on the street to attract foot traffic and get rid of their hardest-to- sell volumes.

As the stores proliferated, they began to specialize. There was a shop for cookbooks, paperbacks (a novelty back then), theatrical memorabilia, science fiction and the occult. 

The area was a magnet for writers and readers. Robert Frost, Andre Breton, and Jack Kerouac were among those going on bookshop crawls.

You know how the story ends: soaring rents put an end to this only marginally profitable business. Books take up a lot of room, and there are always more in storage. That required a good bit of real estate. Now the last vestige of these shops are Strand Books, a huge store (1 million books, it boasts), which moved one block west to Broadway, and Alabaster Books, a new (ca. 1996) shop on Booksellers Row itself. They hold up the tradition.

Top Photo: Secondhand bookstores on Lower Fourth Avenue. ca. 1941-1953, Andreas Feininger via The Museum of the City of New York.

Second Photo: Biblo & Tannen, one of the last shops to give up the ghost, in a picture by Roy Perry, ca. 1940.