The Big Apple’s oldest independent bookstore may live to turn another page thanks to a mystery mogul who has offered the $68,000 they need for back rent.
St. Mark’s Bookshop — opened on the Lower East Side in 1977 — has struggled to stay afloat over the past seven years as sales plummeted amid a new location, a poor economy and digital competition.
When co-owners Bob Contant, 72, and Terry McCoy, 71, fell 10 months behind on rent for the East 3rd Street and First Avenue location in the First Houses, the city took the beloved book palace to court.
That’s when the publicity-shy magnate, described by Contant as “a serious book person and buyer,” stepped in.
“It’s our last hope,” said Contant as he sipped coffee from a mug with the motto, “Never, Never, Never, Give up.”
“If this doesn’t work, we’ll have to go out of business,” he said.
The top-secret benefactor helped once before, in 2014, when he gave the struggling 1,300-square-foot shop $50,000 to replenish its shelves. But the infusion “didn’t quite get us back on our feet,” Contant lamented.
The new back-rent bailout comes with a condition: the store raises enough money to keep stocking books and to continue operating. Right now the store has only about 10 percent of the inventory it needs. The benefactor also has offered to take over the shop’s lease going forward.
“The investor believes we can get through this and make a comeback,” said Contant.
First, it will have to navigate the Housing Authority’s legal move to evict them, with the next court hearing scheduled for March 9.
‘There used to be bookstores on street corners like there are Starbucks now’
- Bob Contant, St. Mark’s co-owner
In its heyday, the cozy shop was known for carrying a hefty selection of structuralist philosophy and attracted a gamut of artists, including Madonna, William S. Burroughs, Philip Glass and Allen Ginsberg.
“Burroughs used to come in every Saturday to buy science-fiction books. He also used to have a big crush on one of my employees,” Constant said, chuckling.
“That was in the early eighties. And Madonna used to come in to buy Charles Bukowski.”
The bookstore’s interior, with its floor-to-ceiling stacks caressing the gently curved walls, won a 2014 design award from the American Institute of Architects.
“It would be a huge bummer for the community” to see the mom-and-pop shop go, said browser Jessica Saab, 20.
Despite its history, the store was priced out of its former location below a Cooper Union dormitory on Third Avenue and Stuyvesant Street in 2014, when the landlord upped the rent to $45,000 a month.
“Business used to be great,” Contant recalled. “Students would come in to buy the classics, and people traveled from all over the world to check out our cultural-criticism section.”
Once the bookstore moved to its current location on a sleepy side street, things “really started looking bad,” Contant explained.
“It’s a different time now with e-books and major players like Amazon,” Contant said. “There used to be bookstores on street corners like there are Starbucks now.”
But he sees a hard-copy revival coming.
“Books are getting popular again like vinyl records are,” he said.