BookCourt Begins Third Expansion in 26-Year History
By Phoebe Neidl
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
COURT STREET — The beloved neighborhood bookshop BookCourt will be nearly doubling its size this fall with the construction of a new wing behind its building at 161 Court St.
The 1,600-square-foot addition, which is being built on property the bookstore already owns, will house a small café as well as its non-fiction books, currently shelved in the basement. The basement space will then be used for “remainders” or discounted books, which BookCourt does not currently sell. The whole project should be completed in late November, before the holiday season.
The growth seems par for the course for owners Henry Zook and Mary Gannett, who’ve been expanding their shop with regularity ever since they opened for business on September 12, 1981, paying a rent of $400 a month in a little storefront at 163 Court St.
After Zook and Gannett bought the building in 1986, they expanded the shop into the basement in 1990. Then in 1996 they bought the building next door, incorporating the ground floor of 161 into their “classic, independent bookstore.”
Plans for this latest expansion have been in the works for the past 11 years, says Mary. But it was the encouragement of the shop’s newest full-time employee that pushed them to break ground — their 23-year-old son Zack, who graduated from college and dove headlong into the family business in 2005.
“We’re really fortunate it worked out this way. It’s a family business, but we didn’t clearly assume this would happen,” said Mary. (Zack studied marine biology at the University of the Virgin Islands).
In addition to the physical expansion, BookCourt will provide a platform for yet another bibliophilistic endeavor this winter, when Zack plans to start publishing “Cousin Corinne,” a literary journal. Featuring fiction, essays, poetry and dramatic works, the journal will be independent of BookCourt, but will clearly benefit from a built-in distribution center and could help segue into Zack’s ultimate ambition — for BookCourt to become an imprint of its own and publish books.
This goal is perhaps not so surprising. Henry and Mary both worked in publishing for a time after they met working at a bookstore in Cambridge, Mass. Mary is also a distant relation of the Gannett family, the largest newspaper publisher in the country, putting out 85 daily papers including USA Today.
In the 26 years BookCourt has been open, the book industry has changed a lot, says Henry. Publishers now print perhaps three times as many books, and there are new kinds of outlets for distribution, such as Amazon.com.
But despite competition from discount Internet sites and from the Barnes and Noble three blocks away, BookCourt continues to flourish, each year making more money than the year before.
Owning the building and therefore not being vulnerable to the area’s exorbitant rents has been crucial to their success. But also, “It’s a great location,” said Henry. “Though we didn’t know that at the time.”
Back in the ’80s, Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope were already becoming hot and therefore too expensive for the budding booksellers. But nowadays, the gentrifying, ex-Manhattanite crowd has converged on their little shop and they sit on the nexus of several of Brooklyn’s most well-to-do neighborhoods — Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens and Brooklyn Heights.
“There’s a very sophisticated literary community here,” said Mary. “And we really just listened to what customers were asking for, which was a good, strong literary fiction section, and special orders were really important.”
The area is fertile ground for book lovers and writers alike. It is teeming with “not just writers, but illustrators for kids’ books, publishers, agents. It’s like a celebration of the book industry,” said Zack.
BookCourt has managed to carve out a vital niche for itself in the industry while continuing to “reflect the neighborhood.”
“There are people who work here now who used to come in as kids,” said Mary.
BookCourt welcomes up to four authors a week for readings, and collaborated with writer Jonathan Lethem (a Boerum Hill resident) and photographer Kate Milford as the sole distributor of their book “Patchwork Planet” (Soft Skull Press, 69 pp.), a collection of essays and photographs.
“It’s more than just about selling the books,” said Zack. “It’s about building relationships,” his mother chimed in.
“The whole essence of an independent bookstore is that it’s owned by people, faces,” said Zack.
“They give it its flavor,” added Henry.
© Brooklyn Daily Eagle 2007
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