I fell in love with independent bookstores one rainy September night in the Lower East Side of New York City, back in the Halcyon days of my ill-spent youth. We(others shall remain nameless)’d finally but cheerfully been chased out of a bar two hours after last call, when all the trains back to New Jersey had stopped for the night. A man we’d just met in the bar asked if we wanted to stop by his store for awhile, and with nowhere else to go, my friend (looking greener every minute) and I took him up on the invitation.

Once we pulled the gate up and ducked inside, my friend scuttled into the bathroom and the man proceeded to tell me about the darkened room while making cups of fair trade coffee. “A lot of love went into this room,” he said, eyes clearly shining with pride and a touch of weariness, while I surveyed an area slightly larger than my kitchen with dim shelves and books with unfamiliar names. He talked about how being forty and barely affording his New York apartment became worthwhile because it meant making this place possible.

It was only weeks after my (arguably conscious) friend and I stumbled out to the subway that we realized where we had been. Turns out my friend had retreated into the bathroom of one of the last independent radical bookstores in New York City, the kind of place where you go to meet reincarnated Beat novelists, Palestinian slam poets, radical queer activists, dumpster-diving freegans with dredlocks who survive on $10 a week, genderqueer feminists and modern-day Pagans. Y’know– the kinds of people we go to cities to gawk and laugh and wonder at (and sometimes wind up becoming).

As one reviewer remarks on yelp.com: “If there’s a better selection of books and tools in New York to help you challenge the Eurocentric, masculinist knowledge validation process and oppose all of the false assumptions undergirding the hegemonic paradigm, I’m not aware of it.” And there’s the glory and downfall of independent bookstores in a long-winded erudite nutshell.

When we write down our To Read lists, what kinds of books do we establish as worthwhile? What do we wind up reading, if anything? If a long day of work leaves our minds reeling and craving nothing but a light Janet Evanovich, when do we create spaces in our lives for Beauvoir, Burroughs, even Homer– the heavy stuff of intellectual transformation? I’m saying this as a former English major down to maybe five completed books a year.

There were times when the opening of a radical bookstore meant the defiant expression of an alternate culture, a subversive stream of thought carving its space into the ordinary world. It sometimes meant
telephone threats, bomb threats, windows broken, in the case of the store Lambda Rising (soon to close). And how radical the effects are when that tiny defiance gathers voices and grows! How vital our bookstores were when they were the only places in all the mute world where we could hear our own voices! When New Jersey is on the verge of becoming the sixth state to legalize same-sex marriage equality, it’s hard to imagine what life must have been like when that gay bookstore’s survival was in doubt.

The time for radical bookstores may be passing, or so that man said to me back on that September night, talking about the rent in Manhattan that had chased all the other radical bookstores from the area. And the internet has opened other kinds of avenues for culture to germinate and flourish.

For all the convenience of the online world, though– some nights, what I wouldn’t give to sip a cup of fair trade coffee between ill-lit, cramped shelves…