Charles Peters, founder of the Washington Monthly. When I was young, I spent a lot of time in the high school library, which had a subscription to the WM under Peters. I remember the magazine’s habit of challenging conventional wisdom and orthodoxy: for example, an article arguing that abortion should remain legal…but should also be a rare event, and should be strongly discouraged under almost all circumstances.
Bob Contant, co-founder of the St. Mark’s Bookshop in NYC. I’m mostly noting this here because of the insight it provides into NYC bookselling:
After working as the manager of the 8th Street Bookshop in Greenwich Village, Mr. Contant, along with Mr. McCoy and two other colleagues, Tom Evans and Peter Dargis, opened the St. Mark’s Bookshop in November 1977 in a $345-a-month storefront at 13 St. Mark’s Place. (Today, apartments in the building sell for upward of $1.6 million, and the Thai-inspired dessert emporium on the ground floor offers Soku tangerine soju seltzer for $10 a can.)
As the East Village exploded with punk vibrancy and business boomed, the store moved to more spacious quarters at 12 St. Mark’s Place in 1987. Six years later, the two remaining partners, Mr. Contant and Mr. McCoy, were invited by the Cooper Union to relocate nearby to the institution’s new dormitory development at 31 Third Avenue, a sleek, award-winning space designed by Zivkovic Associates. They were able to do so thanks to a generous loan from Robert Rodale, a publisher of wellness books and magazines.
But the 2008 recession, combined with a proposed doubling of the store’s $20,000-a-month rent, made the space unaffordable, even after support from Salman Rushdie and Patti Smith, a crowdsourcing campaign that raised $24,000 and a concession by Cooper Union in 2011 to reduce the rent temporarily.
In 2014, the store moved to its fourth and final home, at 136 East Third Street, a side street, as a commercial tenant in a city housing project a half-mile southeast of the original location. Mr. Contant bought out Mr. McCoy for $1, and by the time he grudgingly shuttered the bookshop in its last incarnation in 2016, he owed the city something like $70,000 in back rent; he also owed hefty sums to publishers and wholesalers and some $35,000 in unpaid sales tax. Mr. Contant went bankrupt.
To be fair:
The store never invested in potential revenue add-ons like regular book fairs or readings, and it never sold used books, offered deep discounts or opened an in-store cafe.
Instead, it stubbornly stuck to its classic business model. It sold avant-garde literature, books from small independent presses on subjects like queer theory and anarchy, artisanal greeting cards, art monographs, photo albums of Russian prison tattoos and a selection of 2,000 magazines and underground newspapers, as well as booklets that hungry local writers delivered on consignment.