Winter Partner Bookseller! Community Bookstore and Terrace Books in Brooklyn

Walkable streets, strong neighborhoods, a durable sense of shared purpose: What a bookstore feeds on and gives back

This year for the holidays I decided to stick close to home in looking for a partner bookseller for Book Post*: my own neighborhood place, Community Bookstore in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and its sister store, Terrace Books in Windsor Terrace. Partly I wanted to cheer them on in announcing their new location: Terrace Books is moving from the tiny storefront I encountered when I first moved here during the pandemic, finding a little clutch of readers gathered outside on the sidewalk on folding chairs in their masks, lingering as they picked up their mail-ordered books. I was struck then that Terrace felt as much like a place to gather—a sort of node for readers and point of convergence for their outstretched wishes—as a traditional browsing destination. The shelves you could see through the door remained loaded with books marked for their readers like the request shelf in a library. But as you went further in, when circumstances allowed, you encountered on its loop of offerings, including both new and used books, a jewel-box selection that, like its magical tiny sister in Manhattan, Three Lives, seemed to encompass a world of reading in a very small space—offering it all up like Mary Poppins’s carpet bag. When it moved last month a little further along the park, to an airy new space that used to be an antique shop, it seemed like a good moment to wave the flag for my local store.

New York City presents some aggregated benefits for bookselling, for one thing, a high concentration of writers and publishers (and editors and translators and students and so on) as customers. City Lights bookseller Paul Yamazaki, in his memoir Reading the Room, describes coming to New York for the first time as a young buyer from his native San Francisco and discovering a crowd around the bookselling mecca of 8th Street in Lower Manhattan that provided for books something like what the nearby Cedar Tavern was for painting—a crossroads where Allen Ginsberg and W. H. Auden’s East Village set mingled with the likes of Random House’s Jason Epstein, of whom Paul Yamazaki wrote, “Jason Epstein always felt that so many of his publishing ideas came from wandering through the stacks of the shelves of 8th Street and seeing what was there and what was possible.” The 8th Street spirit lingers in McNally Jackson, a few blocks south, and the tiny Alabaster Books and jumbled Mercer Street Books, as well as the Strand a bit to the north. Which brings me to the second benefit: New York is a pedestrian city with still strongly appreciable neighborhoods. Brooklyn, where many of those writers and publishers now live (for better, or worse) has a raft of bookstores expressing the spirit of its many locales: our former partner Greenlight in Fort Greene; author Emma Straub’s Books Are Magic in Cobble Hill—which she created amidst the distress of many of her neighbors, particularly families, at the closure of the neighborhood’s previous book destination, Book Court; Word in Greenpoint; Cafe Con Libros in Crown Heights; PowerHouse in Dumbo; Unnamable in Prospect Heights; Freebird in Carroll Gardens; Spoonbill and Sugartown in Williamsburg; and newcomer Lofty Pigeon in Kensington; among many more (leave your favorites in the comments!). In 2017 The Brooklyn Eagle responded to a Times article about the death of bookstores by announcing a countervaling “independent bookstore revival in Brooklyn.” “If you’re doing it right, every single bookstore should be unique to its neighborhood,” Hannah Oliver Depp, manager of Word, told the Eagle.

When Susan and John Scioli opened Community Bookstore in 1971 on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope (making it the oldest bookstore in Brooklyn) they were responding to a distinct cultural moment that shaped the neighborhood’s future and also was a ripe for bookselling. As LitHub put it in an interview with staff, “fading industry and harbor traffic” in the area “were undermining its large working and lower-middle class base” (for a portrait, see James McBride’s Deacon King Kong); former residents of the once-elegant brownstones near the park were decamping for the ’burbs; speculators were snapping up brownstones and rooming houses “for pennies on the dollar.” Seventh Avenue, running two blocks from the Manhattan-facing side of Olmstead and Vaux’s once-stately Prospect Park, was, as a fiftieth-anniversary tribute to Community Bookstore in Brooklyn magazine described it, “still mostly lined with empty storefronts and old Irish bars.” John Scioli later recalled, “We talked to people in the publishing industry and book wholesale. And they said, ‘A bookstore in Brooklyn? You’ll go broke!’”

But “a small but growing cadre of urban pioneers, led by school teachers and artists” was starting to gravitate toward the neighborhood’s cheap housing and leafy streets. A health-food store, Back To The Land, that would last for nearly fifty years, had just opened on Seventh Avenue, and the (in)famous Park Slope Food Coop was two years from opening four blocks away, signaling hungers beyond the rudimentary. (The store’s first big seller was The Whole Earth Catalog, see our post on Stewart Brand.) Soon came the writers. Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt moved in within a few years, and convinced Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss to follow a generation later, all devoted Community patrons. “When we moved here, you couldn’t get brunch,” playwright Mary Morris told Brooklyn Paper on the occasion of Community’s fortieth anniversary. “There wasn’t a coffee bar. But the Community Bookstore was here.” Like many of the booksellers I remember from those days, John Scioli, for his part, was not exactly an intellectual, more of a guy looking for an angle. “I used to be an assistant manager in a supermarket in the Village,” he told Gothamist (back when it was a local blog). “I was always in retail. I drove a cab for a while. My wife had been a teacher. She had more of a background in literature and stuff like that. We just decided to take a chance and open a bookstore.”

When the Sciolis divorced in 1980 they diverged into two paradigmatic bookstore vectors. John took over their second location, which they had opened in 1974 on Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights, and oversaw its evolution into a scruffy. overstuffed emporium for used books. When his landlord more than doubled the rent in 1985 he fought back in an early salvo against gentrification. The New York Times reported, “opposing the eviction, many local residents joined Mr. Scioli in arguing that his store is a community asset that should be preserved in the face of an invasion of chain stores into the neighborhood.” Then-City Councilmember Ruth Messenger sponsored a bill to stabilize commercial rents and guarantee lease renewal for tenants, with John Scioli the hearings’ star witness. “At issue is a landlord's right to raise commercial rents, a move that can force ‘mom and pop’ stores out of newly affluent neighborhoods.” John Scioli started offering Mayor Koch’s book Mayor for three times the list price as a protest against his opposition to commercial rent stabilization (it never sold). Eventually John Scioli found a building he could buy for $500,000 on 212 Court Street in nearby Cobble Hill, which he went on to sell 2016 for $5.5 million, planning on moving to the South of France. In an interview during his long cleanup in advance of the move the Gothamist characterized the Cobble Hill store as “one of the last ‘messy bookstore’ strongholds in New York.” (Enjoy the photographs in this Times valedictory.)

John Scioli told The Gothamist:
A lot of young people can’t handle this type of store. They want everything to look like a supermarket, like Barnes & Noble. Very neat. Some young people come in and they say, “Do you have a computer?” I’m like, “No, do you want to buy a computer?” and then they start to walk out. They don’t know how they’re supposed to find anything without a computer—like, they want Hemingway, and I tell him that their book is under the “Hemingway” section. “Oh my God, how did you find it?”

“They all take pictures of the store,” he groused, “even if they don’t buy anything! It’s because they never saw a messy bookstore.” When the interviewer suggested a possible purpose for the pictures he replied, “What do you mean, ‘Instagram’?”

Multi-platformed New York chronicler Kurt Anderson told the Times, “I’ve always been glad it’s there as I walk past,” though he rarely went in, not being a connoisseur of “its particular style of cramped, crowded chaos.” Novelist Jonathan Lethem, by contrast, tried to get a job there as local a kid, telling the Times that it represented “a kind of New York City used bookstore with tremendous character and a very deep inventory, and a certain air of willfulness. Over the years the place became more and more singular and time-lost.” The location is now a Compass Realty.

Susan Scioli remained on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope and persevered more or less serenely as a local institution until a Barnes & Noble installed itself a few blocks away in 1997 (see our portrait of former partner Raven in Lawrence, Kansas, for another tale of pluckily outlasting a Barnes & Noble). As reported at the time in the Times, Susan Scioli refused to go down without a fight. “She drew up a serious battle plan. She matched Barnes & Noble’s discounts on hardcover books penny for penny; she started a book club giving members discounts on purchases; and she took steps to make the store more attractive: down came the back wall and from the dust rose a cafe and outdoor garden.” (The pond in the garden would become famous for its resident turtles.) By 2000, according to the Times, business was “booming, and the store show[ed] consistent growth.” Susan Scioli’s appraisal of her victory recalls the virtues that have kept independent booksellers afloat in the face of Barnes & Nobles’ successor menace, online giant Amazon: “‘In some ways I think that they might be under more threat from us,’ said Ms. Scioli, adding that the chain stores lack friendly and knowledgeable workers and book selections geared to a local clientele.” (In a 2023 episode of the show Louis filmed in the store, Louis C.K.’s character is shocked to find that the bookseller character played by Parker Posey can effortlessly identify for him a book about flowers for kids.)

In 2001, after thirty years, Susan Scioli sold the store to her longtime manager Catherine Bohne, who had started out as a weekend clerk in 1994 when she was twenty-six, using money given to her by her mother and borrowing against her apartment and her mother’s house for the purchase. Three Percent blogger Chad Post (whose work on translation we covered a few weeks ago) described Catherine Bohne as “a very interesting person,” a “great drinker of wine,” and “wonderful person for late night conversations.” Chad quotes her in an interview from the long-lost blog Bookslut:
WHY did I start working in the bookstore? When I discovered the bookstore, in my early twenties, it was the sole (it seems to me now) haven from the terrors of trying to figure out how to live and be a grownup—life was hard and scary, expensive and confusing, and I seemed to find myself in one situation after another that I’d thought I wanted but didn’t really suit me at all … the bookstore was simply the one place that felt calm and sane, peaceful and welcoming. I applied for the weekend job on a whim, got it, and just never left. Whenever other opportunities would come up I’d find that if I was honest, I’d really rather live in the world of the bookstore, and so although it sometimes seemed irresponsible (or at least quixotic) I just stayed and stayed—moving into positions of increasing authority seemed to happen naturally. And now I own it!

When planes struck the Twin Towers a few weeks after the papers were signed, Catherine Bohne removed the books from the front window and turned it into a community bulletin board, transforming the store, in Chad Post’s words, “into a true community center where people gathered to get information and share their pain and experiences.” (In its story on the Brooklyn “Independent Bookstore Revival,” The Brooklyn Eagle noted other instances of bookstores serving as refuge in times of trouble, for example after the 2016 election and the Charlottesville protests. “You could literally see [people’s] shoulders relax,” said Susanne Konig, founder of Powerhouse Arena, of such occasions. “They came in to look for answers, to talk, to feel safe.”) Catherine Bohne populated the store (and its pond) with homeless neighborhood creatures, including the aforementioned turtles, a hairless shih tzu, a four-foot-long iguana, a rabbit, and a long-lived cat and local fixture named Tiny the Usurper. (“He's better known than any of us, that's for sure,” opined future owner Ezra Goldstein seven years later when Tiny was returned from an outing after a brisk neighborhood-wide search.) Catherine Bohne initiated a Park Slope Civic Council umbrella-sharing program, suggesting they print “Who loves you, baby?” on the umbrellas, a feature that didn’t make the final cut. In 2007, as Catherine Bohne tried to manage costs and competition from the lingering Barnes & Noble by slimming inventory and staff, the store nearly went out of business but for a coordinated effort by customers, before the age of GoFundMe, who shared out ownership and restored its finances. Among the lenders was customer John Turturro, who would later contribute to a panel at the store about his fellow Italian Elena Ferrante, telling Time magazine that he always looks for Italian writers and he believes that Ferrante’s novels have a “civilizing” effect, exposing male readers like himself to what it’s like to have female experience. (Neighbors also stepped up to help Emma Straub and her husband fund Books Are Magic when that neighborhood was threatened with bookstore deprivation.)

By 2009, though, Catherine Bohne too was becoming exhausted and confessed after several glasses of wine to a local journalist and longtime customer and supporter, Ezra Goldstein, that she was ready to throw in the towel and move to Albania, a “lifelong dream of hers.” Ezra Goldstein, then sixty, went home to tell his wife, Annette, this alarming news, and Annette said, ‘Well, why don’t you do it? It’ll get you out of the house.’” He teamed up with yet another savior arising from the ranks of devoted employees, Stephanie Valdez, who had arranged events for the store, and they began managing it within months, Catherine Bohne having skedaddled for Albania, finalizing the sale in 2011. “‘Within a fairly short time, it was thriving,’ Goldstein told New York Jewish Week, looking back over what became a thirteen-year run. ‘Once we got books back on the shelves and showed the neighborhood that we were serious about this, everyone got behind us and we just kept going from there.’” By now the neighborhood was quite spruced up from the time of occasional gunfire that Ezra Goldstein remembers from his arrival there from Zainesville, Ohio, in 1986. “Ezra really turned things around by through a combination of discipline, care, and diligence,” noted Stephanie Valdez. He told the Forward that he is “wistful about his former writing life—he has hardly written a word since buying the store—but he’s invigorated by an ‘all-consuming’ job that’s changed his life ‘180 degrees.’” Local novelist Tim Mohr told New York Jewish Week, “checking out the display window at Community offers a gauge of how the neighborhood is thinking and feeling at any given moment.” “We are known for the high quality of the books we stock but, truth be told, those are the books our customers buy,” wrote Ezra Goldstein in his retirement letter. Stephanie Valdez is now the full owner of the store.

Stephanie Valdez and Ezra Goldstein revamped the space, pulled the store of out of debt, and pushed for business improvement district to help fill the many empty local storefronts with independent businesses that would help maintain “fun restaurants, interesting store fronts, and things that will bring people to the neighborhood to help support an eclectic, local economy,” in Stephanie’s words. The bookstore has grown with the neighborhood, serving new readers while maintaining its old neighborhood roots. (See our posts on Malaprop’s in Asheville and Print in Portland, Maine, for accounts of how bookstores are often the leading edge in bringing economic growth to downtowns.) “Many people now understand that shopping local is a political act,” Stephanie Valdez, told the Brooklyn Eagle. “By shopping local, you keep dollars in your neighborhood.”

In 2013 Leonora Stein, the owner of Babbo’s Books about twenty blocks away in Windsor Terrace— dubbed Best Used Bookstore in Brooklyn by L Magazine—got another job buying books for the Tenement Museum and announced she was closing Babbo. A few days later Community Bookstore announced they take had agreed to take it over and carry on as Terrace Books, keeping Babbo’s inventory of used books and supplementing it with new books biked up from the Seventh Avenue store. (Isaac Asimov reportedly wrote the story “Nightfall” across the street from his father’s candy store at 74 Windsor Place, about a block away.) Ezra Goldstein said, “it’s very important for us to preserve bookstores in Brooklyn … we didn’t want to see it go away.” The acquisition of Terrace picked up the used-book thread once carried by John Scioli in Community’s former outposts; the current shop on 10^th Street is all new books but Stephanie Valdez hopes to bring used books back.

In Robert Putnam’s landmark 2000 study of the deterioration of social bonds in America, Bowling Alone (revisited in the recent film Join or Die), a search through mountains of data about civic connection seems to point most frequently at suburban car culture and television for atomizing our lives. Bookstores both thrive on and encourage foot-trafficked streets, and also the growth of informed, place-based social connection through reading groups, story hours, author visits, and just hanging around with strangers and friends and staffers who work with an intimate knowledge of those around them. Community founder Susan Scioli still lives above the shop on Seventh Avenue. A store like Community grows with the generations of its neighbors: it seems remarkable that its fate keeps getting picked up by subsequent generations of committed employees and customers. It connects people out doing their errands with the larger world of ideas just as the daily book review used to do with people reading the local paper (Ezra Goldstein began as a local journalist, nota bene). I visited Nick Raschella, the manager of Terrace Books, to find a book for my son and ask about our partnership while I was picking up my turkey at United Meat Market last week and getting savory pies for lunch for the assembled family at Betty Bakery. I ended up walking out with three more books than I was looking for. It’s been a hard fall, but one way we can begin to build the place we would like to live in is one block at a time.

Special holiday offer! Get a discounted subscription to book-community-building Book Post and a gift card (physical or electronic) from our partner Community Bookstore, more info here!

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Ann Kjellberg is the founding editor of Book Post. By the way, she’ll be appearing at the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research tonight to talk with Yivo director Jonathan Brent and Elisa New, about the recent installment of Elisa’s Poetry in America series on Joseph Brodsky.

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Find the delightful merch of Community Bookstore and Terrace Books here and here