Rizzoli
I’m not a regular in many places – not at coffee shops, not at restaurants, not even at my local bodega – but no matter where I live, I've always had “my” bookstore.
It started young. I spent much of my suburban adolescence loitering at Chapters, the Canadian literary juggernaut since rechristened as Indigo.
In college, I bought used from Book Bazaar in Ottawa.
In grad school, I was spoiled for choice, but my top New Haven haunt was Atticus. For two years, there was no place I adored more.
And in Toronto, I loved to linger at Ben McNally but mostly wound up at Book City on the Danforth.
New York is a different story. Even though I’ve lived here for years, I’m still a bookstore tourist. I’ll cross boroughs to stop in at different shops, but I rarely hit the same spot twice. Bottom line – I haven’t found my literary home base. So I’m starting a New York bookstore tour with the goal of narrowing the field to the best bookshop for me.
First up? Rizzoli, just a few blocks north of my office on Broadway.
Rizzoli bills itself as the most beautiful bookstore in New York, and it may be right. This is a land of warm woods, of gold accents, of marble floors, of soaring ceilings. This is the most dignified and distinguished sort of bookstore beauty.
A few things about Rizzoli. First, this place is a monument to artful book stacking, grouping, and leaning. Here, a person could really learn how to step up his or her coffee table book game to near-Karl Lagerfeld levels.
Rizzoli is also a place for people who appreciate the aesthetics of books as much as their content. Great cover design seems to be a real determining factor in display decisions. Basically, Elena Ferrante books are nowhere in sight.
Finally, the clientele is fascinating. I work at a creative agency downtown and live in Brooklyn, so I generally only encounter Burberry topcoats and high-shine oxfords in the priority boarding lanes at airports. Rizzoli changed that; I saw more monogramming in 25 minutes there than I have in the last year, easy.