Manhattan gets the literary mythology — the Algonquin, the White Horse, the Strand on a rainy Saturday — but the working bookstore life of New York City has, for the better part of two decades now, lived across the river. A Saturday in literary Brooklyn is not a tour. It is a pilgrimage with a transit map. You can move from a 1971 community institution in Park Slope to a 1999 art-book temple in Williamsburg to a pink corner store opened in 2017 to fill a wound left by a beloved closure, and along the way you will pass through neighborhoods that have, more than any single Manhattan address, defined what an American independent bookstore looks like in the twenty-first century.
This is the route. Not a checklist. A route — with addresses, hours, history, and the quiet logic of which store you want to be standing in at which hour of the day, with which book in your hand, and which café around the corner waiting for the next chapter.
Start at Community Bookstore — 143 Seventh Avenue, Park Slope
Begin where Brooklyn’s modern bookstore era begins. Community Bookstore opened in 1971, founded by Susan and John Scioli during the years when Park Slope was still finding itself as a neighborhood. It is the oldest operating bookstore in Brooklyn, a fact that matters less as a trivia note than as a lived inheritance — the wood floors, the back garden, the cat (a long lineage of cats; Tiny the Usurper was the most recent unofficial mascot, joined over the years by a bearded dragon, turtles, and a rabbit) — every detail of the store is a sediment laid down over half a century of bookselling.
The store passed from Susan Scioli to longtime manager Catherine Bohne in 2001, and then in 2011 to current co-owners Ezra Goldstein and Stephanie Valdez, who continue to run it. What you are walking into is the rare American bookstore that has been continuously selling books on the same block since the Nixon administration.
Arrive when they open. The front section is for the new release table, where Valdez and her staff have done the curation work that distinguishes a real bookstore from an algorithmic one. Spend the first half hour here. Do not rush. The whole point of this Saturday is that you are letting bookstores set your pace, not the other way around.
When you are ready to leave, walk through the back room and out into the small garden if the weather allows. Then exit onto Seventh Avenue, turn toward the train, and head north.
Cross to Fort Greene — Greenlight Bookstore, 686 Fulton Street
Greenlight is a different kind of project. Where Community Bookstore is inheritance, Greenlight is a founding act — and an unusually well-documented one. Co-founders Jessica Stockton Bagnulo and Rebecca Fitting met across years of working separately in the New York book trade, at Random House and Penguin and at stores including Borders, Book Culture, McNally Jackson, and Three Lives & Company. Stockton Bagnulo’s business plan won the grand prize in the Brooklyn Business Library’s Power Up! competition in January 2008, taking $15,000 and the attention of the local press.
That same year, the Fort Greene Association — operating off a neighborhood survey in which residents had named “a bookstore” as the single most-wanted new business — reached out. By the autumn of 2008, more than 300 people had attended a pre-launch event at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where Stockton Bagnulo and Fitting announced not just a store but a Community Lender Program, asking neighbors to provide loans for the startup. On October 16, 2009, Greenlight sold its first book at 686 Fulton Street, and the founders later said that it was upon completion of that first transaction that they realized they had opened.
The store today is what that origin story implies: a neighborhood institution that exists because a neighborhood asked it to. Wide front windows. A serious literary fiction wall. A children’s section parents seem to migrate to as if pulled by tide. The events calendar is a working document of contemporary American letters; if you check it before you leave the house on Saturday, you may find that the day’s pilgrimage ends, by accident, at a reading you did not know you needed.
From Greenlight, you have a choice. The northern arc takes you to Williamsburg. The southwestern arc takes you to Cobble Hill. We are going north first, then back south, because the Williamsburg store wants you in the afternoon when the light is right.
North to Williamsburg — Spoonbill & Sugartown, 218 Bedford Avenue
Spoonbill & Sugartown opened in 1999 on Bedford Avenue, founded by Miles Bellamy and Jonas Kyle, who had met years earlier working together at another bookstore. They scouted Tribeca first and chose Williamsburg instead — a decision that, in retrospect, looks like one of the early signals that Brooklyn’s center of literary gravity was shifting. Quentin Rowan joined as an owner in 2003.
The store’s name has the kind of origin only bookstore people produce: Sugartown was lifted from an old Alabama folk song; the spoonbill jumped out of a bird book the founders happened to be flipping through when they realized they needed a name on the paperwork before the store legally existed. The store itself sells new, used, and rare books with an emphasis on contemporary art, architecture, and design — much of it imported, much of it hard to find anywhere else in the city.
This is the store on the Saturday route where time will get away from you. Spoonbill is a destination for monographs you have spent months looking for — Japanese photo books, small-press art catalogues, architecture titles that are out of print everywhere except, somehow, here. The shelves reward slow looking. Bring a list, but be prepared to abandon it.
When you leave, you will have one of two natural pairings. If you came hungry, Williamsburg is full. If you came for more books, the L back to Manhattan is a few blocks away, and so is the long walk south through Williamsburg into the rest of the day.
DUMBO Detour — POWERHOUSE Arena, 28 Adams Street
Before turning back south, the Saturday route allows one detour, and it is worth taking. POWERHOUSE Arena is the flagship retail space of powerHouse Books, the publisher founded in 1995 by Daniel Power out of his Lower East Side apartment, focused on what the company calls “image-driven” publishing — art, photography, popular culture. In 2006, powerHouse opened the Arena at 37 Main Street in DUMBO as a gallery, bookstore, and event space. In 2015, the Arena moved to 28 Adams Street, where it still stands.
The current space is roughly 10,200 square feet, with twenty-four-foot ceilings, a five-thousand-square-foot ground floor and a five-thousand-square-foot mezzanine, more than 175 feet of glass frontage, and a layout designed by David Howell Design. It is, plainly, the most architecturally cinematic bookstore in New York City. You walk in and the first question is not what you came to buy; it is where to look first.
This is where the Saturday route stops being only about books and starts being about the city itself. Standing at the Arena’s front windows, you are inside the largest single-room independent bookstore in Brooklyn, looking out at the cobbled streets of DUMBO, the East River, the Manhattan Bridge overhead. There is no other bookstore experience like it in New York. Stay longer than you planned.
Back South — Unnameable Books, 615 Vanderbilt Avenue, Prospect Heights
Adam Tobin opened the store in 2006 and originally called it Adam’s Books. A textbook distributor called the Adams Books Company threatened a lawsuit, and the name became Unnameable — a reference to Beckett, and a reflection of Tobin’s stated aversion to fixed branding. He wanted, in his words, “some indeterminacy to what the store is or is going to be.”
That indeterminacy turns out to be the store’s defining quality. Unnameable specializes in new and used books with a center of gravity in poetry, literary fiction, philosophy, and small independent presses. The shelves are dense. The aisles are narrow. The store has the kind of inventory you do not find in stores designed for a national chain’s metrics — small-press chapbooks, translation poetry, philosophy titles still in their first paperback printing.
The store began on Bergen Street in Park Slope, moved to 600 Vanderbilt Avenue in 2009 when a rent increase pushed it across the neighborhood line into Prospect Heights, and shifted one block to 615 Vanderbilt Avenue in 2022 upon the expiration of that lease. Unnameable was the bookstore on Adrian Tomine’s 2008 New Yorker cover — the one in which a young couple peer through the window of an independent shop while, across the street, a delivery truck unloads at a warehouse. That image has aged into one of the defining illustrations of what indie bookselling has been up against; the store survived anyway.
Spend the second half of your afternoon here. The poetry section in particular rewards the kind of reading you cannot do on a phone.
Final Stop — Books Are Magic, 225 Smith Street, Cobble Hill
End the day at the pink store on the corner of Smith and Butler. Books Are Magic was opened in May 2017 by the novelist Emma Straub and her husband Michael Fusco-Straub. The store exists in direct response to a closure: BookCourt, the longtime Cobble Hill institution, shut down in 2016 after thirty-five years, and Straub has spoken publicly about the “clear and immediate void” the closure left in the neighborhood. Books Are Magic was opened to fill that void.
It did. In its first year, the store crossed a million dollars in sales — an extraordinary outcome for any independent bookstore, let alone a first-year one. There is a second location now at 122 Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights, but the original Smith Street store is the one you want for this pilgrimage. The pink walls and the gumball machines filled with poetry are not gimmicks; they are the visible parts of a deeply intentional store. The reading nooks for children are real architecture, designed for sitting in. The events calendar runs almost every weeknight and includes weekend storytimes.
End here because Books Are Magic is the store you want to be in at the end of a long Saturday. The light is good. The staff is friendly. You have walked enough by now that you are ready to buy the book you have been thinking about all day, and there is a strong chance it is on the front table.
The Pilgrim’s Route — Practical
Total distance, on transit: roughly fifteen miles end to end across Brooklyn. The full route is a Saturday — start at 10 a.m., end around 6 p.m., with stops for lunch and coffee.
Order, with addresses:
- Community Bookstore — 143 Seventh Avenue, Park Slope. Subway: F/G to Seventh Avenue.
- Greenlight Bookstore — 686 Fulton Street, Fort Greene. Subway: G to Clinton–Washington, or C to Lafayette Avenue.
- Spoonbill & Sugartown — 218 Bedford Avenue, Williamsburg. Subway: L to Bedford Avenue.
- POWERHOUSE Arena — 28 Adams Street, DUMBO. Subway: F to York Street, or A/C to High Street.
- Unnameable Books — 615 Vanderbilt Avenue, Prospect Heights. Subway: 2/3 to Grand Army Plaza, or B/Q to Seventh Avenue (Park Slope side).
- Books Are Magic — 225 Smith Street, Cobble Hill. Subway: F/G to Bergen Street.
Hours: Most of these stores open between 10 and 11 a.m. on Saturdays and close between 8 and 10 p.m. Check each store’s official site the morning of — Saturday hours occasionally shift for events.
Café pairings: Park Slope has the strongest density (Konditori, Café Regular du Nord); Fort Greene offers the long-running Greene Grape Annex; Williamsburg you do not need help with; DUMBO has the Almondine bakery one block from POWERHOUSE Arena; Prospect Heights has Hungry Ghost on Vanderbilt; Cobble Hill, end the day at Court Street Grocers or sit in the back garden of a nearby restaurant.
Pacing: If you only have half a day, run the southern arc — Community, Unnameable, Books Are Magic. If you only have an afternoon, run the northern arc — Greenlight, Spoonbill, POWERHOUSE Arena. The full six-store route is a real Saturday; treat it like one.
What This Route Says About Brooklyn
The Saturday bookstore route across Brooklyn is, finally, a kind of literary biography of the borough across fifty-five years. Community Bookstore in 1971. Spoonbill & Sugartown in 1999. POWERHOUSE Arena in 2006. Unnameable Books in 2006. Greenlight Bookstore in 2009. Books Are Magic in 2017. Six stores, six decisions to open in this borough rather than across the river, six bets on a neighborhood that paid off in the form of a working literary infrastructure that Manhattan, for all its mythology, increasingly looks to.
None of these stores are museums. They are working bookstores, with rent and payroll and a Tuesday morning shipment to unbox. The pilgrimage is the point — but so is the buying. Bring cash, bring a tote, leave with at least one book per stop. That is how this works. That is how it keeps working.
[46-Day Capture: This piece is part of the helpnewyork.com 46-Day Pilgrim Capture. If you walked this route — or any portion of it — we want your photos, your finds, and the title of the book you ended the day with. Capture form embed pending.]
Frequently Asked Questions
Which is Brooklyn’s oldest bookstore?
Community Bookstore at 143 Seventh Avenue in Park Slope, opened in 1971 and continuously operating since. It is the oldest operating bookstore in Brooklyn.
Why did Books Are Magic open?
Novelist Emma Straub and her husband Michael Fusco-Straub opened Books Are Magic in May 2017 to fill the void left when BookCourt — the longtime Cobble Hill institution — closed in 2016 after thirty-five years.
Can the full Brooklyn bookstore Saturday route be done by transit?
Yes. The F, G, L, C, 2/3, and B/Q lines connect every stop on the route. Plan on a full day for all six stores.
Which Brooklyn bookstore is best for art and design books?
Spoonbill & Sugartown at 218 Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, founded in 1999, specializes in new, used, and rare books on contemporary art, architecture, and design — including imported and hard-to-find titles.
