Brentano's

To All The Bookstores I've Loved Before

When I was a kid, just about every shopping mall had a Brentano’s bookstore. Unlike Walden’s or Borders stores, which favored genre fiction, Brentano’s had a definite litfic bent. The stores’ design, which featured dark wood veneers and gold embossed signage, telegraphed what people of my parents’ era called “classy.” As a budding writer, I would sometimes stroll into a Brentano’s if only to absorb its rarifed atmosphere.

Brentano’s was founded in 1853 by a Jewish Austrian immigrant, August Brentano, as a newsstand outside the New York Hotel. Brentano was the first newspaper distributor to import newspapers from London and other English cities¹, catering to the well-heeled hotel clientele of the day.

By 1928, the year before the U.S. Stock Market Crash would bring on an unprecedented ten year global economic depression, Brentano’s was the largest bookstore chain in the US, with four stores in New York, as well individual stores in Chicago, Boston, Washington, DC and Paris.²

The four New York City stores included a luxe flagship store on Fifth Avenue at 47th Street³ (the building is still there!) and a store in Union Square, the lively lower Manhattan neighborhood at the intersection of Broadway and Fourth Avenue (formerly Bowery Road)⁴ anchored around a park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux⁵ of Central Park fame. (Union Square also happens to be my first NYC nabe where I lived from 2008 to 2011).

Into the early 1960s, Union Square was a bibliophile’s paradise, remarkable for its abundance of booksellers, the sole survivor of which is the Strand. At its height, “Booksellers’ Row” (or “Book Row”) spanned six city blocks — the stretch of Fourth Avenue between Union Square and Astor Place — and encompassed nearly 40 bookstores selling mostly secondhand and rare books.⁶

While researching my historical fiction novel, IRISH EYES, I came across the above photo of the Union Square Brentano’s, then Brentano’s Literary Emporium, at 39 Union Square at 16^th Street. In August 1914, Rose and her daughter take refuge from the sun beneath Brentano’s “cool blue awnings.” Finishing their ice creams, they are about to go inside to avail themselves of the bookstore’s “bank of whirring ceiling fans” when Rose receives a shocking surprise. The next day, Wednesday, the 5^th of August, the world receives an even greater shock: England, America’s closest ally, has joined seven Allied nations in declaring war on Germany.

The mid-twentieth century saw a series of acquisitions, starting in 1962 with Crowell Collier, a publisher of magazines (e.g., Collier’s) and general interest books later absorbed into Macmillan. In 1982, Brentano’s filed for bankruptcy. By the nineties, the Brentano’s brand was part of the Borders-Waldenbooks Group division of Kmart. When Borders finally folded in 2011, any remaining Brentano’s stores were closed. Today, the last remaining Brentano’s, reinvented as a hybrid bookstore and gift shop, is in Paris at 37 Avenue de l'Opéra.

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Coming December 2023… IRISH EYES, Book 1 of my new American Songbook series, spans twenty-five years of Gilded Age through the Jazz Age Manhattan, as seen through the eyes of spirited Irish-born Rose O’Neill. Read more here.

1. https://www.jm-hohenems.at/en/jewish-quarter/brunnen/august-brentano

2. "Brentano's". New York Herald Tribune. 15 January 1928. p. J14. ProQuest 1113424643. Now "Brentano's" on West Forty-seventh street probably the foremost bookshop in the world. Over a million books are kept in stock, and there are branch shops in Washington, Chicago, Paris, London. Arthur Brentano, nephew of the founder, is senior member of the present organization.

3. https://www.nytimes.com/1965/02/22/archives/brentanos-to-add-a-48thstreet-wing.html

4. https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/union-square-park/history

5. https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/union-square-park

6. Conroy, J. Oliver (March 4, 2019). "Why are New York's bookstores disappearing?". The Guardian. Retrieved June 25, 2019.