Leaves & Word Bookstores
Time of the Twins
I’ve decided—and don’t quote me on this in case I give up—that I want to visit every independent bookstore in New York City as named by this list and write about the experience of being there. It could take weeks—it could take years! The fun is in the not-knowing.
Leaves Bookstore
I visited Leaves just as it was opening, so it was just me, the shopkeeper, and an older man in a suit looking for Jackson Pollock books. When he was leaving the store, he stepped around me and said, “Excuse me, beautiful.” (Side note: I never get hit on more often than I do in bookstores.)
Leaves had many good things going for it, according to my metrics. First of all, there’s a large $5 section: memoirs, fiction, nonfiction. This section had one of the craziest book curations I’ve ever seen: Henry Roth next to Kylie and Kendall Jenner. (Who knew Kylie and Kendall had a book? And, more importantly, who knew that they titled it Time of the Twins? Sounds like a threat, if you ask me.) Second, the fiction section was great. Lots of recent publications, organized alphabetically.
Really, though, the important thing to highlight is that this bookstore is just cute. It’s haphazardly organized in a cool, aesthetic way. There’s a single leather chair–-not the most comfortable for reading, I’d imagine, as it’s similar to sitting in the middle of the store with a spotlight shining on you. But cute, nonetheless. The merch is cool, too: bookmarks and t-shirts with the Leaves logo in discordant colors.
Word Bookstore
Word is a nice, normal neighborhood indie bookstore. They do a lot: extensive fiction and nonfiction, huge kids’ selection, an event space downstairs. In doing everything, though, they don’t necessarily thrive at any one thing, and I found their curation to be a little uninspiring. For example, instead of a staff recommendations wall, they had a “currently reading” wall for their employees. One employee was reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a 1,200+ page book. Am I meant to take that as…a recommendation?
To me, though, one of the strangest, most comical sections was Word’s puzzlingly small “local authors” shelf. At first, I assumed these must be Greenpoint authors, since, like, 50% of all published authors seem to live in New York. No such luck: a confusing shelf included Chanel Miller (who I associate with California), Jane Austen (definitely British, unless I’ve been very confused for a very long time), and John Green (who I feel very confident in saying is from Ohio). Mislabeled? A test of perception?
I feel the need to stress here that Word is a solid bookstore. It’s cool, it has cute cards, I imagine it’s good for families. Case in point: I saw a child in the store. She seemed happy enough. And they had the very new hardcover copy of Katabasis by R.F. Kuang with the trendy sprayed edges. So, you know, there’s that.