Taking Stock (for Once), Self-Styled Hoarder Makes Lucrative Deal to Close Bookstore
John Scioli never met a book he did not like. They loom over the doorway of the Community Bookstore in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, his home of 30 years, cataracts of white, brown and yellow pages tumbling from the 10-foot ceilings and spilling out onto the corner of Court and Warren Streets.
To the regulars, neighbors, dinner dates, bookworms, French transplants, Spanish tourists, Italian grandmothers and authors acclaimed or otherwise, the Community Bookstore is a beloved local fixture, even to those who recoil at the cluttered and musty shelves that endear the place to everyone else.
“I’ve always been glad it’s there as I walk past,” said Kurt Andersen, a radio host, an author and a resident of nearby Carroll Gardens. He has ventured inside maybe once. “Its particular style of cramped, crowded chaos is not really my bookstore ideal,” he said.
Once a mainstay of brownstone Brooklyn and literary Manhattan, secondhand shops like Mr. Scioli’s now seem like relics deposited by receding glaciers. Then, one day, they are gone, and for the Community Bookstore, that day is near.
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John Scioli, at the entrance of his shop, has agreed to sell the three-story brownstone and move out in the next year. Credit Christopher Lee for The New York Times
This time there is a happy ending, if not for the neighborhood, then at least for Mr. Scioli, who will soon turn 70. His is not a case of a opportunistic landlord shutting down a beloved shop — if it was, that would have happened long ago. Mr. Scioli was able to stay as long as he did only by virtue of owning the building, which he has finally agreed to sell after offers piled up like the donated books on his stoop. A few buyout proposals were actually slipped under his door.
Not only is Mr. Scioli getting $5.5 million for the three-story brownstone, but he has a year to clear out the shop and another two years to move out of his apartment upstairs — time he very much needs.
“I’ll be the first to admit I’m a bit of a hoarder,” he said last week from his regular perch, a blue folding chair just outside the bookstore’s doors. “I was afraid I was going to die under a pile of books one of these days, and no one would ever find me.”
A former cabby born in Little Italy, he opened the first Community Bookstore, on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope, in 1971 with his wife at the time, Susan. It was her idea, as she sensed a need among the spreading bohemia. They opened a second store on Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights three years later. When the couple divorced in 1980, among the possessions they split were the bookstores, with Mr. Scioli taking the one in Brooklyn Heights.
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“I’ll be the first to admit I’m a bit of a hoarder,” Mr. Scioli said. Credit Christopher Lee for The New York Times
The shop soon became a cause célèbre when the lease expired and the landlord wanted to triple the rent to $3,500. Neighbors rallied and newspapers took note, especially as Mr. Scioli became the protagonist for a City Council effort to enact commercial rent control.
In protest, he put a copy of “Mayor,” Edward I. Koch’s autobiography, on sale for $53.85, three times the retail price. It never sold, nor did the rent protections come to pass.
Determined not to lose his lease again, he set out to become his own landlord. The only building he could find was at 212 Court Street, in Brooklyn, a recently renovated former bar, for which he paid $500,000.
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Mr. Scioli in 1984. Credit Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times
The Community Bookstore is not the kind of place one goes for the latest best sellers, literary magazines, a coffee or an author talk. It is a place to rummage and ruminate, a place for treasure hunters and lost souls as much as bibliophiles.
The genre-bending novelist Jonathan Lethem remembers trying to get a job there while growing up a few blocks away.
“It was fairly representative of a kind of New York City used bookstore with tremendous character and a very deep inventory, and a certain air of willfulness,” he wrote in an email. “Over the years the place became more and more singular and time-lost.”
Its stock, estimated at 60,000 to 100,000 books, can feel as broad as Amazon’s, with better deals, though it takes some bushwhacking to find them. There is no computer to help search but also no need; Mr. Scioli knows exactly where everything is.
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Mr. Scioli on his usual perch outside the bookstore: a blue folding chair. Credit Christopher Lee for The New York Times
“You never know what you’re going to find here, and that’s the appeal,” said Gregory Ronan, who makes trips from Douglaston, Queens, to hunt for unusual titles. “It’s not somewhere you go with a book in mind, but with books on your mind.”
The building’s buyers are thinking beyond books.
They are three brothers from Manhattan who already own a half-dozen retail properties, including 2 Herald Square, home to a large Victoria’s Secret at the corner of West 34th Street; a building with a Patagonia outlet in the Meatpacking District and another building on Madison Avenue with a Roberto Cavalli boutique. There are no concrete plans for 212 Court Street, but given the $5.5 million purchase price they will quite likely be in line with the other new shops on the street: Rag & Bone, Lululemon and J. Crew.
“We’re starting to see Bowery numbers down here,” said Brian McDermott, a broker at the Corcoran Group who arranged the sale. Retail rents have gone from $60 a square foot to $200 a square foot over the past two years.
For now, Mr. Scioli can still be found at the door, where he waves to everyone he knows, and many he does not, while chain-smoking Marlboros every day. Or, more precisely, every evening, since the shop does not open much before 5 p.m., though it stays open past midnight.
“People are too busy during the day to browse,” he said.
Even as he worries about clearing out in time with 10 months and tens of thousands of books to go, Mr. Scioli cannot say no. On Thursday, Dahlia Radley-Kingsley donated a complete set of Barbri books for studying for the bar exam that a tenant had abandoned in her brownstone.
“You never know who might want something,” he said. “Believe me, I tried to go out of business two or three times. I can’t believe people still put up with this place. But no matter what I did, people just kept buying books.”
Copyright © 2015 The New York Times Company. Reprinted with Permission. Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times.
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