{"id":1161,"date":"2016-03-23T13:30:19","date_gmt":"2016-03-23T13:30:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wombatsdigit.com\/w\/?p=1161"},"modified":"2016-03-23T13:30:19","modified_gmt":"2016-03-23T13:30:19","slug":"farewell-to-the-community-bookstore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wombatsdigit.com\/w\/farewell-to-the-community-bookstore\/","title":{"rendered":"Farewell to the Community Bookstore"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/culture\/culture-desk\/the-final-months-of-brooklyns-most-cluttered-bookstore\">The New Yorker has a video and short article<\/a> up regarding the imminent closing of The<\/p>\n<figure style=\"width: 232px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"http:\/\/sanemagazine.net\/godcoffee.html\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/sanemagazine.net\/images\/godcoffee.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"232\" height=\"290\" \/><\/a><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">God Coffee, I Never Finished You<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Community Bookstore on Court Street in Brooklyn. It wasn&#8217;t the (surely deliberate anachronistic and ridiculous getup of the) New York Times reporter or the man-on-the-street soundbites about what went on in that pretty that I enjoyed, but the walk down my old neighborhood, scene of many a walk while I composed the perambulatory (and thankfully never finished)\u00c2\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/sanemagazine.net\/godcoffee.html\"><em>God Coffee, I Miss You<\/em>.<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0It was a paean to my time in Brooklyn and those blocks sandwiched between 2nd Place and Atlantic Avenue, fresh out of college and living the life of Riley, where I spent\u00c2\u00a0a lot of my weekends and mornings after having worked until all hours at Avalanche, a hip little new media company on Hudson Street (near the offices of Viking Penguin and many a literary agent), home to the venerable\u00c2\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.rsub.com\/thebluedot\/borderequalszero\/\">BorderEqualsZero,<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0in Cobble Hill Park, watching the nannies from the islands congregate while their charges ran around the grass in the middle of the beautiful brick buildings in that neighborhood.<\/p>\n<p>The Community Bookstore was just down the street from that park, and I&#8217;d go in and pick up a used book or two, or three, all in the name of fleshing out this novel, or the next one, or the next. There was the flashier, cleaner <a href=\"http:\/\/bookcourt.com\">BookCourt\u00c2\u00a0<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0down the street\u00c2\u00a0and the even bigger and flashier Barnes &amp; Noble\u00c2\u00a0across\u00c2\u00a0Atlantic Avenue, and, of course, I&#8217;d browse through those, as well, but with my student-loan saddled shoulders, I came away with the most books from the Community Bookstore. While it was a good deal messier, it reminded me, for sheer volume and the sense that books had digested the room, of the back closet on my grandfather&#8217;s porch of a three decker in Worcester, Massachusetts, where books lined every shelf, in all states. It was a sort of magical space, where who knew what you were going to find, but it was likely going to be worth the archeology, whatever it was.<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;re in the area I highly recommend stopping by for the sheer experience of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The New Yorker has a video and short article up regarding the imminent closing of The Community Bookstore on Court Street in Brooklyn. It wasn&#8217;t the (surely deliberate anachronistic and ridiculous getup of the) New York Times reporter or the man-on-the-street soundbites about what went on in that pretty that I enjoyed, but the walk [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nonsense","category-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wombatsdigit.com\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wombatsdigit.com\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wombatsdigit.com\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wombatsdigit.com\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wombatsdigit.com\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1161"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wombatsdigit.com\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1161\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wombatsdigit.com\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wombatsdigit.com\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wombatsdigit.com\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}