Gotham Book Mart

Marcel Duchamp’s window display titled ‘Lazy Hardware.’ 1945

New York’s independent bookstore landscape has always been precarious. Around the corner from The Strand and Alabaster, the stretch once known as Book Row housed eight other shops — Arcadia, Anchor, Green, Corner, Schultes — a concentrated literary world that has largely vanished. The greatest of them was the Gotham Book Mart at 16 East 46th Street, New York’s answer to Paris’s Shakespeare & Company.

Frances Steloff founded it in 1920 as a basement shop in the Theatre District. It quickly became a refuge for avant-garde and frequently banned books — Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover — and a gathering place for writers who defined the century. Marcel Duchamp, W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Susan Sontag, Gertrude Stein, Gore Vidal, and Marianne Moore all came through. In 1947, the James Joyce Society was founded here with T.S. Eliot as its first member. Tennessee Williams once worked as a clerk for a day.

Steloff sold the store in 1967 but continued living above it, making regular appearances until her death in 1989 at age 101. Gotham Book Mart moved three times before settling at its 46th Street address in 2004. It closed in 2007, and 200,000 volumes from its holdings were donated to the University of Pennsylvania.

Location: 16 East 46th Street, New York, NY 10017 (closed 2007)