A Spanish-Language Store Is Forced to Close Its Books

Books


A Spanish-Language Store Is Forced to Close Its Books
By MOTOKO RICH
Published: September 24, 2007

Edgardo Vega Yunqué, a Puerto Rican-born novelist, began going to Librería Lectorum, one of the oldest Spanish-language bookstores in New York, in the early 1960s as a student at New York University.

Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times
Librería Lectorum, a Spanish-language
bookstore and longtime cultural resource
in Greenwich Village, is closing on Saturday.

Nowadays, if he needs a Spanish-language book, he is more likely to buy it online. The last time Mr. Vega visited Librería Lectorum, which closes its doors for good on Saturday, was about a year ago. “It’s more important as a presence rather than a resource,” said Mr. Vega, who lives in Brooklyn. “It’s more like a cultural icon — like a statue — that reminds us of who we are.”

Unfortunately, that cultural landmark needed to sell books to stay afloat. With new rent increases, “we could not run the bookstore in a profitable way,” said Teresa Mlawer, president of Lectorum Publications, a Spanish-language publishing and distribution unit of Scholastic Inc. that also owns the bookstore.

In a city — and a country — that has seen dozens of bookstores close in the face of online competition and dwindling customer traffic, the demise of Lectorum comes as a particular blow to the Hispanic literary community in New York. For nearly a half-century Lectorum has dispensed a wide range of translations of popular American titles by authors like John Grisham and Nora Roberts, as well as a vibrant collection of books by Spanish and Latin American novelists, poets and playwrights. It has also welcomed a steady stream of writers for readings at the store on 14th Street in Greenwich Village.

Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times
Juan Pablo Debesis, manager of Librería
Lectorum, has worked there for 31 years.
“It’s a huge and really significant loss to the cultural and intellectual life of Spanish-speaking people and Latin Americans in New York,” said Ana Dopico, associate professor of comparative literature and Spanish and Portuguese at New York University.

Ms. Mlawer said Lectorum would upload the bookstore’s inventory onto its Web site. And she said Scholastic would continue to be a host to writers from Spain and Latin America in its SoHo offices.

But those who have spent years browsing Librería Lectorum’s floor-to-ceiling shelves don’t believe it can be replaced so easily. “There is no way that sales online are going to substitute for something that is tangible,” said Eduardo Lago, a novelist and executive director of Instituto Cervantes New York, a nonprofit Latin American cultural group.

Certainly it is hard for an online bookseller to replicate the personal advice and attention that the staff at a bricks-and-mortar store can offer. At Lectorum Juan Pablo Debesis, who has worked at the store for 31 years, said he often awoke at 4 a.m. so he could read new titles coming in from Latin America and advise his best customers on what to buy. He also helped professors select titles for their syllabuses.

David Unger, the head of the publishing certificate program at City College of New York, said that without an actual home, it would be difficult for Lectorum to attract Spanish-language readers to events. He recalled a reading he attended four months ago at Lectorum for the Cuban writer Mabel Cuesta, who read from a collection of poems published by Ediciones Vigía, a Cuban publishing collective that prints only 200 copies of each book.

The bookstore, Mr. Unger said, “is a community magnet for artists, writers and musicians to gather and experience deeply and profoundly their Latin American heritage.”

On a morning earlier this month, Mr. Debesis, showed off two walls of photos from past events, featuring writers including Isabel Allende, the Chilean author of “The House of the Spirits”; Nilo Cruz, the Cuban-American playwright who won the Pulitzer Prize for “Anna in the Tropics”; and Jorge Volpi, a Mexican novelist. He also pointed out photos of celebrity customers like Antonio Banderas and Benecio del Toro.

Ms. Mlawer said the store’s location on 14th Street, once a neighborhood that attracted Latinos from around the city with a church, restaurants, crafts stores and a food and gift emporium, had seen its status as a center for Spanish-speaking activity diminish as some of these places have closed. “It’s no longer the hub of Latino life,” she said.

When the landlords, who were, coincidentally, sons of the original founders of the store, raised the rent this year, Ms. Mlawer said the company could no longer justify paying it. One of the brothers, Kenneth Gutiérrez, said they had offered a rate that was 30 percent below market because they “genuinely cared about renting the space to an institution that was loved and appreciated throughout the city.”

His parents, Gerome and Nora Gutiérrez, Argentine immigrants, founded the business in 1960 when they started importing bilingual dictionaries from a publisher in Buenos Aires and sold them out of their car and from their apartment on 116th Street in Manhattan. They eventually opened a store on Seventh Avenue in Chelsea, moving to the Avenue of the Americas before finally landing on 14th Street in 1962.

In 1971 the Gutiérrezes sold the store to Ms. Mlawer’s husband, William Mlawer, then head of Simon & Schuster’s reference division, and Michael Shimkin, also an executive at Simon. The new owners expanded the business to distribute Spanish-language textbooks and other materials to schools and libraries and, in 1990, the business began publishing Spanish-language children’s books. They sold the company to investors in 1993, who in turn sold it to Scholastic in 1996.

Today Lectorum distributes about 20,000 titles, mostly to schools and libraries. It also publishes about 15 books a year.

According to Richard Robinson, Scholastic’s chairman and chief executive, the bookstore represents less than 10 percent of the Lectorum unit’s revenues. “If it were potentially a vital service in that location, we would keep it going, but it just doesn’t seem to have that characteristic right now,” he said.

He added that Scholastic was better able to serve Latino students in American schools — who represent a much larger group than the customer base of Librería Lectorum — through other arms of the company, which include a Spanish-language book club and a literacy-outreach program for Spanish-speaking parents, caregivers and teachers.

Ms. Mlawer said that the company had “not closed the door” on looking for an alternate location in New York or elsewhere.

But loyal customers of the Lectorum bookstore are lamenting its demise as part of the perhaps inevitable turnover of some of the city’s oldest institutions. “So many fabulous places have been closed,” said Fernando Torm, 63, a writer and multimedia artist who dropped by the store recently to find a volume of poems by Rubén Darío and was shocked to learn that the store was closing. “Everything is business.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/24/books/24span.html