New York, New York
New York Diary: Barnes & Noblin’
After a month of free magazines and dirty bathrooms, ROSECRANS BALDWIN gives up on the Union Square Barnes & Noble and goes home for a nap on his floor.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
- Ways We're Saving Money (Of Recent Note)
- When It Sizzles (Letters From Paris)
- 2008 Editors' Awards for Online Excellence (Awards)
Also by Rosecrans Baldwin
» SEE MORE
- My Man Mac (February 12, 2008)
- Known for Her Crumb Cake (January 23, 2008)
- Dog Crazy (December 12, 2007)
Also in New York, New York
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The morning crowd at the Union Square Barnes & Noble can be intimidating. Outside the front doors, on 17th Street, a crowd of twenty-or-so gathers before the store opens at 10 o’clock, some people standing only inches away from the entry’s three double-doors. Commuters pass by and stare. Dressed in knee socks, loafers, tan shorts, and large glasses, an elderly man the other morning tapped on the windows at 10:03, clutching his briefcase, obviously impatient. When the guard inside didn’t respond, he looked at his watch and held it up to the window for the guard to acknowledge her tardiness. Two minutes later, a young guy, college-aged, slacker-style, walked by me and stopped to wonder at the crowd, one cigarette in his mouth and another in his fingers, a Blowpop in his other hand; ‘Dude,’ he said, as we filed in, ‘People are reading today.’
Based on the dress of most people outside, the average shopper was on their way to work, needing a paperback or magazine (or, one may guess, an Itty-Bitty-Booklamp) before heading to the office or to school, but fashion alone is a naïve way separate the regulars from the in-transits. The café on the third floor, sponsored by Starbucks, has as many well-dressed salarymen and women as Park Avenue in the morning, each on time and leaving hours later, though not a one, to observation, has a day job they’re required to attend.
I’ve been to the Barnes & Noble café three times a week for the past month, arriving around ten and staying until two or three. Ever since quitting my job and starting to write full-time, I’ve found I occasionally need an escape from my apartment, and the bustle of a large bookstore offers an anonymity that’s actually cheaper and more easy to come by than at your average East Village coffeeshop where it’s too obvious, when someone passes your table, that they realize you’re writing. Not that I’m self-conscious, or ashamed of my pile of legal pads and Uniball Micro Deluxe pens, just that there are so many people writing at Barnes & Noble one oddly feels granted membership in a club, a free inclusion: we are here because we can’t afford an office, need social atmosphere, and like to read magazines for free on break.
If only they carried The New York Times.
* * *
Barnes & Noble also knocks each of us down a level: everyone is writing a novel right now. (Pause: Yes, this is pure conjecture on my part for my fellow B&N commuters, but you never know, and it works as a good assumption for the rest of the story.) When I started my first book, three years ago and just months out of college, I didn’t know anyone working on anything larger than short stories, screenplays, or poetry (or, then, building Web sites), or if they were, they were in an MFA program somewhere deep in the country and were usually spiteful over the phone toward their work-in-progress, as if it were the form of the novel at fault, not themselves.
In my mind, I was the only one in Manhattan getting up each morning before work to write at his desk for two hours, later typing it into my laptop and backing everything onto a ZIP disk. (Horribly, an article showed up at one point in the Times, author now forgotten, with a conjecture about ‘how many writers there must be in New York, this minute, backing up a novel onto a ZIP disk.’ Reading this at my desk at work one morning, just an hour after completing the reporter’s fantasy, I felt doomed, as if I’d bought a corduroy jacket with arm patches or some other cliché.)
Chalk it up to being 22, self-absorbed, and perpetually single, but I was lonely. I never introduced myself as a writer, partly from a self-inflating desire to let people tease it out of me (You’re working on a novel? Really? Oh. My. God., the fantasy went, and then she’d hand over a lifetime supply of hundred-dollar bills), but mostly from a real fear of being judged: asked about the plot I’d seize up, then ramble for half an hour about art-group conspiracies and devastated marriages, Brooklyn, matricide, and the current state of American romance, actually finding more progress in my story by talking about it for a few minutes than I’d made on legal pads in six months.
It took me three years to realize I had no idea what I was writing about.
But now I have six friends writing books, and know enough successfully published and unpublished authors to start a commune founded on a few minutes of hope, and hours of prancing and self-doubt. My father kindly reminded me last week of a conversation he had with a friend at a big publishing house: ‘Did you know, publishers receive 30,000 unsolicited manuscripts a month? Isn’t that amazing!?’
What’s more amazing is that he thought this was a good and encouraging story to share with his son. Three years ago it would have made me sick or angry, now it rolled off my back: like the friends I know writing books seriously, it’s not the hope of publishing that motivates us, but the desire to get a big story right.
Ha—The things we tell ourselves…
At a wedding last weekend in Prospect Park for two friends (and it was a beautiful wedding—the groom played three songs after dinner dedicated to his wife that should have driven us outside to wait it out, but turned instead to inspire envy, [he’s a pro—it wasn’t fair] real happiness, and many guys cursing their parents for not enforcing piano lessons) and my table of eight turned out to have five writers, one with two novels under her belt and a third on the way, another with a new baby and his first book just bought by St. Martin’s, a third who seemed anxious to confess something. I asked Julie, the bride, if she had put us together, all strangers, with this shared-occupation in mind; she laughed, seemingly at how absurd the question seemed. And looking back, I completely agree. When my fiancée and I were introduced two years ago, we were each told beforehand the other one was a writer; we were mutually horrified.
Writing a novel has no manual, no obvious diagram for construction, and too many easy ways to exploit the foibles of people you love, and so each writer develops his own process, a way of getting through the writing hours without, he hopes, succumbing to the anxieties that arrive, timed to a minute, like trains fully loaded with insightful psychoanalysts. (You can only read so much Gardner before losing all hope, or, like I did last week, spending the afternoon napping on the floor and, afterwards, eating an entire pint of Vanilla Heath Bar Crunch.) Because the writing process is so personal, so completely based on our own values and confessions and seemingly crafted in the depths of a coveted sickness, the writer is wary to share his secrets. In my case, the methods I’ve developed are my own, with influences but personally tailored, and they’re even more reflective of why I write than what I’m writing.
Basically, it’s only fun to hang out with other writers as long as you don’t talk about business. And you can bet at Barnes & Noble, there is zero conversation.
* * *
Most mornings the same regulars surround me, and most in their usual places. If nothing else, it’s our cell phones that unite us: everyone has one, and most keep theirs on the table—it’s actually rather desperate and sad-looking—in obvious sight and when anyone answers, we all stare, jealous it isn’t us.
The worst cell-phone offender I’ve nicknamed The Blazer. Always in an oversized blue blazer with gold buttons, dark jeans, and a button-down shirt, The Blazer is an older Native American with thinning black hair that reaches the middle of his back. He’s crippled, slow-moving, and has a hard time walking around the store; still, he always orders coffee and a snack then chooses the longest route to his seat along the wall. A few minutes later, someone will call him or he’ll call out, either case he’s a ranter and possibly a lunatic, probably a businessman; he shouts and curses and sounds exactly like your average New Yorker with bad reception.
One morning, a girl sits next to me, a newcomer, I haven’t seen her before, and after setting up her desk (including a special wooden prop to hold up her textbook, pages of gory medical illustrations), she calls her boyfriend.
A few minutes later, fuming: ‘I call you at 9am to make plans, and now I’m the bitch. [pause] Well, I never see you, I can’t win, I can’t win.’ Her forehead, at this point, is on her palm and nearly touching the table as her elbow continues slipping off.
Everyone in the café hears this, but no one takes notice. We’re all nameless readers and writers, and our work—that which brought us to Barnes & Nobles—is supposed to be publicly exclusive, a conversation with ourselves in plain sight. To be barged in on by someone else’s conversation feels intrusive; for it to be so sad, doubly-worse.
Jonathan Franzen, in a ’98 essay ‘Imperial Bedroom,’ writes:
The regulars, besides The Blazer, from mid-August to mid-September 2002:
Middleman: 40-or-so, white, gray-haired, usually well-dressed and shaved, orders coffee and a scone and brings the Wall Street Journal in his bag, sits with his legs crossed, cell phone on the table, reads the entire paper from 10:30–12:00. After 12:00, sits and stares, or writes in a day planner. Usually gone by 2:00. Evokes sympathy.
Sketch Artist: Late 50s, early 60s, black, long dreadlocks, usually dressed entirely in white including a beret or baseball hat, prefers to sit by the windows overlooking Union Square, carries a large sketchbook, charcoals, and a miniature tabletop easel. Can spend entire day (or half) drawing other customers. Frequently talks to strangers.
Med Student: Mid-20s, Asian, long hair, casually dressed student-style, arrives with a stack of MCAT books she actually uses, filling out test bubbles with a pencil, but hasn’t been seen purchasing. Drinks iced tea or regular tea. Able to sit for long periods without using the bathroom.
Fashionistamaybe: Early 20s, ultra-skinny, South American, definitely has flair, including hip-hugger jeans that show two inches of her thong in the back, see-through tops with no bra, wrap-around green sunglasses, and rainbow socks with American flag high-tops. Reads magazines, usually leaves by 12:00. Prefers to curl up in the corner.
Headwrap: Mid-30s, black, extremely skinny, quite handsome, wears the same outfit every day—white tank top, gray flannel pants, flip-flops, tote bag, and dirty white head wrap. Never seen reading or shopping, just browsing or riding the escalators.
The fascinating thing is that I’ve seen Headwrap at this Barnes & Noble at least 20 percent of the time since my first visit to the store, back in high school. Even during winter, he wears the exact same outfit, plus a jean jacket or a puffy coat. A visit, now, is incomplete without him—I watch and imagine he’s there, somewhere else in the store when I leave without seeing him. Once I had a whole story worked out: he was an employee strangled in the travel section and now haunts the store in the outfit he wore that day, returning books to their rightful places. I even thought of interviewing him for this Web site, figuring he was a unique New York character, but never got up the nerve.
I actually haven’t seen him in a month or so.
* * *
‘Yeah,’ my friend Petter said over drinks, ‘But man, why Barnes & Noble?’ In his question, the way he said it, was every valid critique of the monster bookseller: the size, the ugliness, its stature as big business, its history of ruthless undercutting, marking-down, and lot-paving, the few smart salesclerks and the genuinely hostile ones, the lines, the crowds, the bookstore-as-tourist-magnet, the lack of personality, the killer, in fact, of personality, the murals of dead writers, the tote bags, the mugs.
Unwittingly, Petter’s question inspired the first day of my last week at Barnes & Noble. I had plenty of ways to answer him, but none stood up well under scrutiny, and now it’s been a week and I’ve kicked the habit. From here on, my magazines will be subscribed, my coffee made at home, my regulars the crazy guy in sweatpants ranting at the neighbors and Bobby, the corner bartender. No longer will I ride the Manhattan train in the morning and pretend to be going to the office. Moving on, I’ve found a new place for my daily commute, much closer to home. Not because I have anything against the all-powerful beast that is Barnes & Noble, or its all-welcome public bathrooms; I moved on because I was tired of being part of the frenzy outside the doors, tired of the large crowds, the needing to ask someone to watch my stuff while I pee, the temptations, the small tables, the Penguin Lives series, and afraid, in my most pleasant and masturbatory fantasies, of being interviewed one day about writing a bestseller and answering, ‘Actually, yes, I did write the entire thing at Barnes & Noble. [pause] I owe them my life.’
Then I sob and Charlie Rose hugs me and I forgive him for always talking over his guests.
In a few months I’ll probably find a new place again. The new one already scares me; I see too many people I know, and there’s a crazy guy whose insanity is intimidating: he barks, shouts, his voice eerily flat and low, and carries a piece of paper that he’s covered with writing, reading from it: ‘The children know…the powerplant must come down…we’re all dying…’ He also manages to sit next to me every morning.
When it comes to dress, or eating, even exercise, I like precise routines, but they inevitably go stale and need readjustment or complete overhaul. I imagine that the process of writing, reading, walking around a neighborhood, though seemingly as perfect and untouchable each morning as a good day’s draft, is actually always changing, hopefully to more right and less wrong, until the process becomes as personal and ritualized and impossible to remember doing otherwise as how one puts on pants: hold them below the knees, hike one leg up, sink, scrunch around while the heel burns fabric into the floor, pull up waist, pull up pantleg, plunge other foot down rabbit-hole, cinch, slouch, belt.
And then, I guess, even those routines are changed. The nice thing is, my new place has two communal copies of the Times every morning, which, if you think about it, is like saving $936 a year. Living on a tight budget, you can’t beat that.
Based on the dress of most people outside, the average shopper was on their way to work, needing a paperback or magazine (or, one may guess, an Itty-Bitty-Booklamp) before heading to the office or to school, but fashion alone is a naïve way separate the regulars from the in-transits. The café on the third floor, sponsored by Starbucks, has as many well-dressed salarymen and women as Park Avenue in the morning, each on time and leaving hours later, though not a one, to observation, has a day job they’re required to attend.
I’ve been to the Barnes & Noble café three times a week for the past month, arriving around ten and staying until two or three. Ever since quitting my job and starting to write full-time, I’ve found I occasionally need an escape from my apartment, and the bustle of a large bookstore offers an anonymity that’s actually cheaper and more easy to come by than at your average East Village coffeeshop where it’s too obvious, when someone passes your table, that they realize you’re writing. Not that I’m self-conscious, or ashamed of my pile of legal pads and Uniball Micro Deluxe pens, just that there are so many people writing at Barnes & Noble one oddly feels granted membership in a club, a free inclusion: we are here because we can’t afford an office, need social atmosphere, and like to read magazines for free on break.
If only they carried The New York Times.
Barnes & Noble also knocks each of us down a level: everyone is writing a novel right now. (Pause: Yes, this is pure conjecture on my part for my fellow B&N commuters, but you never know, and it works as a good assumption for the rest of the story.) When I started my first book, three years ago and just months out of college, I didn’t know anyone working on anything larger than short stories, screenplays, or poetry (or, then, building Web sites), or if they were, they were in an MFA program somewhere deep in the country and were usually spiteful over the phone toward their work-in-progress, as if it were the form of the novel at fault, not themselves.
In my mind, I was the only one in Manhattan getting up each morning before work to write at his desk for two hours, later typing it into my laptop and backing everything onto a ZIP disk. (Horribly, an article showed up at one point in the Times, author now forgotten, with a conjecture about ‘how many writers there must be in New York, this minute, backing up a novel onto a ZIP disk.’ Reading this at my desk at work one morning, just an hour after completing the reporter’s fantasy, I felt doomed, as if I’d bought a corduroy jacket with arm patches or some other cliché.)
Chalk it up to being 22, self-absorbed, and perpetually single, but I was lonely. I never introduced myself as a writer, partly from a self-inflating desire to let people tease it out of me (You’re working on a novel? Really? Oh. My. God., the fantasy went, and then she’d hand over a lifetime supply of hundred-dollar bills), but mostly from a real fear of being judged: asked about the plot I’d seize up, then ramble for half an hour about art-group conspiracies and devastated marriages, Brooklyn, matricide, and the current state of American romance, actually finding more progress in my story by talking about it for a few minutes than I’d made on legal pads in six months.
It took me three years to realize I had no idea what I was writing about.
But now I have six friends writing books, and know enough successfully published and unpublished authors to start a commune founded on a few minutes of hope, and hours of prancing and self-doubt. My father kindly reminded me last week of a conversation he had with a friend at a big publishing house: ‘Did you know, publishers receive 30,000 unsolicited manuscripts a month? Isn’t that amazing!?’
What’s more amazing is that he thought this was a good and encouraging story to share with his son. Three years ago it would have made me sick or angry, now it rolled off my back: like the friends I know writing books seriously, it’s not the hope of publishing that motivates us, but the desire to get a big story right.
Ha—The things we tell ourselves…
At a wedding last weekend in Prospect Park for two friends (and it was a beautiful wedding—the groom played three songs after dinner dedicated to his wife that should have driven us outside to wait it out, but turned instead to inspire envy, [he’s a pro—it wasn’t fair] real happiness, and many guys cursing their parents for not enforcing piano lessons) and my table of eight turned out to have five writers, one with two novels under her belt and a third on the way, another with a new baby and his first book just bought by St. Martin’s, a third who seemed anxious to confess something. I asked Julie, the bride, if she had put us together, all strangers, with this shared-occupation in mind; she laughed, seemingly at how absurd the question seemed. And looking back, I completely agree. When my fiancée and I were introduced two years ago, we were each told beforehand the other one was a writer; we were mutually horrified.
Writing a novel has no manual, no obvious diagram for construction, and too many easy ways to exploit the foibles of people you love, and so each writer develops his own process, a way of getting through the writing hours without, he hopes, succumbing to the anxieties that arrive, timed to a minute, like trains fully loaded with insightful psychoanalysts. (You can only read so much Gardner before losing all hope, or, like I did last week, spending the afternoon napping on the floor and, afterwards, eating an entire pint of Vanilla Heath Bar Crunch.) Because the writing process is so personal, so completely based on our own values and confessions and seemingly crafted in the depths of a coveted sickness, the writer is wary to share his secrets. In my case, the methods I’ve developed are my own, with influences but personally tailored, and they’re even more reflective of why I write than what I’m writing.
Basically, it’s only fun to hang out with other writers as long as you don’t talk about business. And you can bet at Barnes & Noble, there is zero conversation.
Most mornings the same regulars surround me, and most in their usual places. If nothing else, it’s our cell phones that unite us: everyone has one, and most keep theirs on the table—it’s actually rather desperate and sad-looking—in obvious sight and when anyone answers, we all stare, jealous it isn’t us.
The worst cell-phone offender I’ve nicknamed The Blazer. Always in an oversized blue blazer with gold buttons, dark jeans, and a button-down shirt, The Blazer is an older Native American with thinning black hair that reaches the middle of his back. He’s crippled, slow-moving, and has a hard time walking around the store; still, he always orders coffee and a snack then chooses the longest route to his seat along the wall. A few minutes later, someone will call him or he’ll call out, either case he’s a ranter and possibly a lunatic, probably a businessman; he shouts and curses and sounds exactly like your average New Yorker with bad reception.
One morning, a girl sits next to me, a newcomer, I haven’t seen her before, and after setting up her desk (including a special wooden prop to hold up her textbook, pages of gory medical illustrations), she calls her boyfriend.
A few minutes later, fuming: ‘I call you at 9am to make plans, and now I’m the bitch. [pause] Well, I never see you, I can’t win, I can’t win.’ Her forehead, at this point, is on her palm and nearly touching the table as her elbow continues slipping off.
Everyone in the café hears this, but no one takes notice. We’re all nameless readers and writers, and our work—that which brought us to Barnes & Nobles—is supposed to be publicly exclusive, a conversation with ourselves in plain sight. To be barged in on by someone else’s conversation feels intrusive; for it to be so sad, doubly-worse.
Jonathan Franzen, in a ’98 essay ‘Imperial Bedroom,’ writes:
All I really want from a sidewalk is that people see me and let themselves be seen, but even this modest ideal is thwarted by cell-phone users and their unwelcome privacy.The girl is now even less welcome because of her conversation; if I recognized her as a regular, I might have been more lenient. Regulars are your friends-by-default, the ones you hope will recognize you in a dire emergency, when, say, you’re choking on a four-dollar piece of Starbucks cheesecake and hoping your family won’t remember you as ‘the dead guy who paid too much for dessert.’
(The essay’s reprinted in Franzen’s new book, ‘How To Be Alone,’ a collection of non-fiction and the only contemporary book I’ve allowed myself since a recent avowal of anything published in the last fifty years, for fear of mimicking others’ styles or structures; Thomas Hardy, here I come. The book includes a cover photo of Three Lives & Co., an extraordinary bookstore on 10th Street where you buy your books when you A) don’t want to actually pay for anything at Barnes & Noble, and B) can afford new hardcovers and want to stock up on bookmarks.)
The regulars, besides The Blazer, from mid-August to mid-September 2002:
Middleman: 40-or-so, white, gray-haired, usually well-dressed and shaved, orders coffee and a scone and brings the Wall Street Journal in his bag, sits with his legs crossed, cell phone on the table, reads the entire paper from 10:30–12:00. After 12:00, sits and stares, or writes in a day planner. Usually gone by 2:00. Evokes sympathy.
Sketch Artist: Late 50s, early 60s, black, long dreadlocks, usually dressed entirely in white including a beret or baseball hat, prefers to sit by the windows overlooking Union Square, carries a large sketchbook, charcoals, and a miniature tabletop easel. Can spend entire day (or half) drawing other customers. Frequently talks to strangers.
Med Student: Mid-20s, Asian, long hair, casually dressed student-style, arrives with a stack of MCAT books she actually uses, filling out test bubbles with a pencil, but hasn’t been seen purchasing. Drinks iced tea or regular tea. Able to sit for long periods without using the bathroom.
Fashionistamaybe: Early 20s, ultra-skinny, South American, definitely has flair, including hip-hugger jeans that show two inches of her thong in the back, see-through tops with no bra, wrap-around green sunglasses, and rainbow socks with American flag high-tops. Reads magazines, usually leaves by 12:00. Prefers to curl up in the corner.
Headwrap: Mid-30s, black, extremely skinny, quite handsome, wears the same outfit every day—white tank top, gray flannel pants, flip-flops, tote bag, and dirty white head wrap. Never seen reading or shopping, just browsing or riding the escalators.
The fascinating thing is that I’ve seen Headwrap at this Barnes & Noble at least 20 percent of the time since my first visit to the store, back in high school. Even during winter, he wears the exact same outfit, plus a jean jacket or a puffy coat. A visit, now, is incomplete without him—I watch and imagine he’s there, somewhere else in the store when I leave without seeing him. Once I had a whole story worked out: he was an employee strangled in the travel section and now haunts the store in the outfit he wore that day, returning books to their rightful places. I even thought of interviewing him for this Web site, figuring he was a unique New York character, but never got up the nerve.
I actually haven’t seen him in a month or so.
‘Yeah,’ my friend Petter said over drinks, ‘But man, why Barnes & Noble?’ In his question, the way he said it, was every valid critique of the monster bookseller: the size, the ugliness, its stature as big business, its history of ruthless undercutting, marking-down, and lot-paving, the few smart salesclerks and the genuinely hostile ones, the lines, the crowds, the bookstore-as-tourist-magnet, the lack of personality, the killer, in fact, of personality, the murals of dead writers, the tote bags, the mugs.
Unwittingly, Petter’s question inspired the first day of my last week at Barnes & Noble. I had plenty of ways to answer him, but none stood up well under scrutiny, and now it’s been a week and I’ve kicked the habit. From here on, my magazines will be subscribed, my coffee made at home, my regulars the crazy guy in sweatpants ranting at the neighbors and Bobby, the corner bartender. No longer will I ride the Manhattan train in the morning and pretend to be going to the office. Moving on, I’ve found a new place for my daily commute, much closer to home. Not because I have anything against the all-powerful beast that is Barnes & Noble, or its all-welcome public bathrooms; I moved on because I was tired of being part of the frenzy outside the doors, tired of the large crowds, the needing to ask someone to watch my stuff while I pee, the temptations, the small tables, the Penguin Lives series, and afraid, in my most pleasant and masturbatory fantasies, of being interviewed one day about writing a bestseller and answering, ‘Actually, yes, I did write the entire thing at Barnes & Noble. [pause] I owe them my life.’
Then I sob and Charlie Rose hugs me and I forgive him for always talking over his guests.
In a few months I’ll probably find a new place again. The new one already scares me; I see too many people I know, and there’s a crazy guy whose insanity is intimidating: he barks, shouts, his voice eerily flat and low, and carries a piece of paper that he’s covered with writing, reading from it: ‘The children know…the powerplant must come down…we’re all dying…’ He also manages to sit next to me every morning.
When it comes to dress, or eating, even exercise, I like precise routines, but they inevitably go stale and need readjustment or complete overhaul. I imagine that the process of writing, reading, walking around a neighborhood, though seemingly as perfect and untouchable each morning as a good day’s draft, is actually always changing, hopefully to more right and less wrong, until the process becomes as personal and ritualized and impossible to remember doing otherwise as how one puts on pants: hold them below the knees, hike one leg up, sink, scrunch around while the heel burns fabric into the floor, pull up waist, pull up pantleg, plunge other foot down rabbit-hole, cinch, slouch, belt.
And then, I guess, even those routines are changed. The nice thing is, my new place has two communal copies of the Times every morning, which, if you think about it, is like saving $936 a year. Living on a tight budget, you can’t beat that.
—Published September 24, 2002
