F E AT U R E S
Searching for Nothing The joys of the Book Culture browse. BY WILLA NEUBAUER
A
lthea Lamel is an Upper West Side native and the manager of Book Culture on Broadway, two blocks north of the store’s 112th Street location. Aside from Columbia’s bookstore, Book Culture’s independent holdouts remain the last bookstores in Morningside Heights, a neighborhood that was once brimming with them. When I met Lamel in late May, she was sitting behind a desk lined with pocket-sized easy reads, the paperback equivalents of clickbait. Beside her, an elderly woman with a beret sifted through sci-fi, and a man with a Columbia University face mask pulled a book from a section titled “Staff Picks.”
Illustration by Aeja Rosette
Lamel is aware that Book Culture’s readership is diverse, and that store demand changes as its customers do. “When we first reopened last June, everyone was only buying books about pandemics, from nonfiction to classics to contemporary dystopian books, and books about race and racism in America,” Lamel said. Now, interest has shifted. “I do think this year it has been hard to focus on a book, so we’ve been selling a lot of books to customers who just want some-
26
thing light and riveting that they can escape into.” Lamel understands the collective exhaustion that weighs classrooms and workplaces down these days, even as the virtual era draws to an end. In a year with fewer vacations, beach reads have certainly infiltrated tables, bookshelves, and the hands of subway riders desperate for escape. Stephanie Meyer’s Midnight Sun was the fourth best-selling book of 2020, next to Where the Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens’s clichéd mystery set in a North Carolina swamp town. The stuff of late-aughts middle-schooler fantasy, Midnight Sun is a retelling of the Twilight saga from the eyes of vampire Edward Cullen, now represented by an especially pale, magnificently groomed Robert Pattinson. Lamel has her own picks on the beach-read front. “If there’s one book I’ve recommended to almost anyone I’ve spoken to this year, it’s the book Scorpionfish by Natalie Bakoupolos,” she said. “I read it last summer when I was stuck in the city and it was a good placeholder for a vacation, as the book really transports you to Athens in the summer. It’s also a book about reflecting, both forward and back, which I think we’ve all done a lot of this year.” In the early weeks of spring, Book Culture employees wheeled a cart of children’s books, books on sale, and soon-to-be-out-of-print paperbacks onto the sidewalk of 112th Street. Some copies are used, others are new and less attractive—a large paperback on American insects, a book on Soviet cityscapes, and a study of Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe’s collaborations titled Guise and Dolls. Distinct from Columbia’s bookstore on 114th Street, owned by bookseller giant Barnes & Noble, Book Culture’s identity lies in an eclectic assortment of bestsellers and smaller, independent press releases. Located in a space formerly occupied by Labyrinth Books, and before that by an extension of the 112th Street USPS, the store’s character seems to spill from its enclave beside the post office and onto the surrounding sidewalk.
THE BLUE AND WHITE
