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EVG reader Yenta Laureate spotted workers moving the very first books/periodicals into the new St. Mark's Bookshop at 136 E. Third St. west of Avenue A this afternoon... to be in place for a possible Sunday (soft) opening...
The book shelving is designed to stimulate the ocular experience. Vertical supports are pulled back to pronounce the horizontal edges of the shelving. Sharp corners are eliminated, smoothed into a continuous series of horizontal bands which allow the eye to glide around the space without visual friction. Vision is further privileged by adjusting the form of the shelving. Lower runs are canted so as to tilt book spines towards eye level of the viewer. Section titles are literally etched into the wood of the shelving to maintain the continuity of the lines.
We probably won't open at 136 East 3rd Street until next week. Call ahead: 212-260-7853
— St. Mark's Bookshop (@stmarksbookshop) June 30, 2014
Confirmed: We are moving to 136 East 3rd Street on July 1 and will remain open at 31 Third Ave through Sunday, June 29.
— St. Mark's Bookshop (@stmarksbookshop) June 25, 2014
On June 23 we close at 10 pm and hope to open a few days later at 136 East 3rd St.
Our @Indiegogo closed last night. Thanks for helping us raise $51,740 toward our move! http://t.co/7Wour7EH3C
— St. Mark's Bookshop (@stmarksbookshop) May 17, 2014
The new store will be half the size of the current one, but the rent of $6,000 is barely one-quarter of the $23,500 charged by their landlord on Third Avenue, the Cooper Union. The store has had support from writers and readers, and raised more than $40,000 on the crowd-funding site Indiegogo (the campaign continues through Friday). The new landlord is the city. The owners are exploring a transition to nonprofit status.
We've been sent a proposed lease, and we have a lawyer who has gone through it and sent comments to the landlord, who is the city, or NYCHA. There's a long way to go to signing a lease, though."
The Student Residence offers apartment-style housing for 178 students. Units range in size to accommodate from three to five people, with the majority of the apartments being two bedroom units shared by four people. Each unit contains a bathroom, common living area, and kitchenette. The building amenities include a study room, laundry room, the Residence Hall Office, and the Menschel Room.
We invite you to an Auction of Signed and Annotated First Editions to Benefit St. Mark's Bookshop
ONLINE AUCTION
Tuesday December 3 - Sunday December 15
LIVE EVENT
Thursday December 5 6-8 PM
$5 at the door
We are conducting an auction of over 50 rare signed and annotated first editions and ephemera from some of NYC’s best known writers. The auction will benefit St. Mark’s Bookshop, and help fund its upcoming move. Included are works from Yoko Ono, Anne Carson, Junot Diaz, John Ashbery, Patti Smith, Art Spiegelman, Walter Abish, Paul Auster, Bill Berkson, Charles Bernstein, Lydia Davis, Kenneth Goldsmith/Joan La Barbara, Richard Hell, Major Jackson, Wayne Koestenbaum, Phillip Lopate, Eileen Myles, Arthur Nersesian, E. Annie Proulx, Sam Shepard, Peter Straub, Lynne Tillman, Anne Waldman and Tsipi Keller.
Bidding begins December 3 online here
On Thursday Dec. 5, you are invited to come to the bookstore, where all the works will be on display for bidding and there will be a Live auction of selected works. If you can’t be present for the live event, you can leave an absentee bid online.
Join us and share wine and light refreshments.
136 East 3rd Street
Rentable Square Footage: 1,328
Rent: $60.00 per square foot
$79,680 per year/$6,640.00 per month
But that is only one piece of the store’s fundraising plans so that it can stay in the East Village in a space near Avenue A and Third Street. The president of Cooper Union has offered to help the bookstore by letting it use the school’s Great Hall for a fundraiser and to contact some of the schools’s donors on the store’s behalf. Those details are still being worked out.
The new location would be about half of the store’s current size, or 1,300 sq. ft. Co-owner Bob Contant regards the store's downsizing as a good thing. “The print book business isn’t as robust as it used to be,” he points out. “Where we sold 25 books, now we sell five.”
St. Mark's Bookshop is presently immersed in this change. We seek to relocate to a new space and while we're at it, reinvigorate the shop's identity. Our vision includes the kind of curated, progressive selection of titles in literature, poetry, politics, critical theory, small press publications and hard-to-find journals and magazines our customers have come to expect to find on our shelves.
We also envision a hybrid organization that would present nonprofit arts programming, including a comprehensive roster of author events, lectures and literary gatherings housed by a community-supported bookstore, a physical brick-and-mortar space where people meet, discuss ideas, browse, discover and enjoy non-electronic books and publications and listen to great writers present their work.
We're passionate about this future and hope you will help us get there. Here's how you can get involved in launching the new St. Mark's Bookshop.
VOLUNTEER:
We need individuals
• people with expertise in marketing and in the following sub-specialties: social media, public relations and communication campaign strategy. Two to eight hours per month, September-December.
• educators/academics, readers and writers to be our advocates. Get on our growing mailing list, follow us on Twitter and Facebook and share news about St. Mark's Bookshop with your personal and professional networks. Help to get out the word about upcoming events and key dates announced in our newsletter, September 2013 forward.
• community networkers — who do you know? Help St. Mark's Bookshop connect with advocates throughout the city, the rest of the country and across the globe. September 2013 on.
Look for updates in mid September and throughout the rest of 2013. We will announce our new location soon!
And please drop by the bookshop. We remain committed to the East Village community and local writers.
St. Mark's Bookshop is 35 years old today! Long live books & book lovers!
— St. Mark's Bookshop (@stmarksbookshop) November 13, 2012
ST. MARK’S BOOKSHOP RAISES $23,000 (AND COUNTING) ON LUCKY ANT
Two weeks ago Lucky Ant set out to help embattled St. Mark’s Bookshop finally make a real push towards financial sustainability. The goal was to raise at least $23,000 to help toward the cost of moving to a smaller store and develop the online presence needed to compete.
What happened?
With a few days to spare, St. Mark’s Bookshop surpassed their fundraising goal. They currently stand at $24,560 from 405 customers. The most popular pledge was the $100 and most of the support came locally (76% from New York). We did see support from all over the world including pledges from Japan, Australia, France and 7 other countries.
What’s next?
The bookshop raised the minimum they need to get the ball rolling on their transformation. The full cost of the move could cost up to $100,000 and we are keeping the pledging open until the deadline this Friday night at 11:59. We hope to continue to see pledges coming in and to raise the maximum we can.
What this means:
The rewards were structured so that pledgers were not only pledging their financial support today, but will receive discounts for the year to come and we hope that this will encourage a surge in sales for the bookshop.
In the grander scheme of things this is the first time the community has put their money where their mouths are. After pledging to support the bookshop, through Lucky Ant, the community has proven that it will not stand idly and watch neighborhood institutions fail. This is a victory for bookshops, but also for small business everywhere.
2. St. Mark's Bookshop is not just a place that sells (and curates) culture and history. St. Mark's Bookshop IS living history.
As a bookstore, St. Mark's holds an institutional memory of major moments in alternative publishing history. The owners (and some longtime employees) both worked at 8th Street Books, which was the New York bookstore the Beats frequented and the New York bookstore that embraced the "paperback revolution." Both owners worked also at East Side Books, an East Village bookstore which was known as a place to find underground comics, mimeographed novels, and local political pamphlets — at a time when these were a major currency of the cultural revolutions and the avant garde. St. Mark's opened in the late '70s, making a place for artistic expressions to live and breathe alongside new areas of inquiry we take for granted today, such as sections with labels like "Vietnam Studies" or "Lesbian and Gay Studies."
In order to survive these difficult times, St. Marks is repositioning itself in the marketplace and implementing a new strategy for the future. These changes, such as moving to a more affordable location and developing a more sophisticated online presence, are a direct response to the changing business environment and will help the bookstore to once again become financially viable. Major changes are not cheap however, and St. Marks needs capital to finance these improvements. Through community investments, St. Marks hopes to raise the capital needed to once again make itself a viable business.
The Details:
Date: Saturday, July 21
Time: 3 p.m.
Place: St. Mark's Bookshop, 31 3rd Avenue between 8th and 9th
Goal: Spend money on books! Tell them "Jeremiah sent me" and if you're one of the first 20 people to spend $10, you get a $5 gift certificate for your next visit.
After the Mob: Head over to Bar 82 at 136 2nd Ave., between 8th and 9th, to drink and celebrate with your fellow cash-mobbers.
St. Mark's Bookshop, a literary fixture in the East Village for 35 years, is hoping to move out of its current home when its rent goes up toward the end of this year.