Memories ARE NOT a Closed Chapter

The West Side was once known for its independent bookstores. There were quite a few — the New Yorker, Shakespeare & Co., Endicott Booksellers and Murder Ink. Today, we’ll focus on one — Coliseum Books, on Columbus Avenue at Columbus Circle.

Coliseum Books at 1775 Broadway at 57th Street was a huge store — with about 110,000 books spread over two floors. Not only were there books on every conceivable subject, but the staffers were also known for their literary knowledge. At least for this writer, no trip to the Columbus Circle area, or even to Lincoln Center, was complete without a visit to Coliseum Books.

The store was opened in 1974 by George Leibson (a former manager at Bookmaster’s), Sy Rubin and Irwin Hersch. Eventually, Rubin died, leaving Leibson and Hersch as co-owners. Since the West Side was known for its intellectuals, it had a ready-made audience.

According to a 2006 article in the “New York Sun,” (also since shuttered) by Gary Shapiro, among the famous people who shopped in the store were Philip Roth and Liza Minelli. Shapiro also wrote, “Playwright Tony Kushner was once quoted in The New York Times saying that when the [original] store closed, he and his partner ‘practically wore black armbands.’ Pete Hamill listed the store as one of the reasons worth living in New York.”

Leibson, interviews point to, was very pleased with his enterprise — except for the fact that some customers tended to ”walk off with” the books without paying, and others spilled coffee or got peanut butter on the books. He once bragged that he “stuck to basics” — he didn’t need to install a café like Barnes & Noble to get people to buy books.

However, around that time, the store began to have financial trouble. The problem wasn’t the Internet — at that time, buying and selling on the web was still in its infancy. The problem was the constant expansion of chains like the aforementioned Barnes & Noble and Borders. In the ‘90s, new branches seemed to be opening everywhere in the city. Rising rents in Manhattan didn’t help the financial situation of independent bookstores, either.

The original bookstore closed in 2002. The following year, Coliseum opened in a new location at 11 West 42nd Street — and this store had a cafe. Here, too, Coliseum continued to have its admirers. Still, by then, the Internet, particularly Amazon, was a serious competitor.

In September 2006, the store filed for bankruptcy. Book-lovers rushed to buy books discounted at 20 percent or 40 percent off. In the end, a slogan that was printed on Coliseum T-shirts might serve as an epitaph: So Many Books, So Little Time.