Alicat Bookshop Blues
The only indie bookstore in Yonkers, the Alicat Bookshop on 287 South Broadway, was owned by radical lefties Oscar and Florenz Baron...
Book lovers might return to their first bookstore with as much emotion as they would remember a first love. They will remember every nuance of their first encounters, from the sound of a cash register’s ring to the slight crinkling of the book being stowed into a paper bag, and how the store looked in the late afternoon light with its thick shades rolled up or slightly tattered and fading, curling down. They recall the scent of new books with shiny covers or old musty tomes with yellowed pages as conjuring as much emotion as the scent of their lovers’ hair.
People who love books love them that much.
Book lovers feel very much at home in community bookstores. Independent “indie” bookstores give people a place to experience books. People who own indie bookstores curate their collections and know how to conjure the magical fit between a book and a reader. In this way, indie bookstores are crucial for creating a sense of community around books. The number of indie bookstores in a town or city often mirrors the demographics of a culture.
In the city of Yonkers, where I grew up, there was only one indie bookstore, the Alicat Bookshop on 287 South Broadway. The store smelled as musty as a pair of my grandfather’s old leather boots, finely crafted but cracking at the seams. Books overflowed on tables and were piled high to the ceilings, much taller than I could reach at age ten.
I held one paperback classic, Nana by Emile Zola in my small hands, flipped the tattered pages, and for the first time in my life I made a book mine for a quarter. It took years before I could fully appreciate the French novel Nana. Emile Zola was a little over my head, but even then I longed to reach higher than my hands could grasp. I owned Nana and it became part of me.
The Alicat was legendary in the book world. The bookshop had actually expanded into a small press, publishing a series of chapbooks with a limited print run of 750 copies that were each sold for a dollar. Alicat’s owners, Oscar and Florenz Baron, claimed to have been the first to publish Henry Miller’s works that had originally been banned in America. The Alicat Bookshop also published other outcast chapbooks: Charles Willeford (Miami Blues) and William Carlos Williams (Paterson).
Oscar Baron ran the bookshop. Florenz was rumored to have a small art studio next door. She was a frequent visitor to Beauford Delaney’s studio in Soho, where he painted two portraits of her.
The Barons considered themselves to be radical lefties who hobnobbed with the literary likes of Anais Nin, Maya Deren, Dorothy Parker, William Carlos Williams and James Baldwin. But as a kid I didn’t know that.
I did know they sold brown-paper-wrapped mystery packages of eight or ten old books for a quarter. Buy, trade or sell, you could return two books for a new one.
Due to a lease dispute with their landlord, the Alicat shut its doors in 1974. Oscar Baron died two years later, but Florenz Baron continued to sell books from her home on Ludlow Street in Yonkers well into the 1980s.
Today Yonkers, the third most populous city in New York State, only has one bookstore, a Barnes & Noble, which is hardly an indie. The complete absence of indie bookstores in Yonkers might be a reflection of the city’s working-class culture.
Book lovers find more than solace in a book. They remember the parts of themselves that they left behind, as well as the parts that still travel with them. There is a much larger story surrounding the Alicat Bookshop, one I aim to tell. The Alicat Bookshop was my first love and I will always find a way to go there.
Alicat Bookshop Blues is an essay in my collection NOTES From the Working-class. I’m also the author of the Yonkers Trilogy, and the nonfiction work “The Death of a Library: An American Tragedy.”