Best Book Store in NYC: St Mark’s Bookshop

I love St. Mark’s Books. Located at 31 Third Ave. (right near Astor Place), this bookstore is clearly the cream of the crop in nyc, and I recognize that there are a lot of choices. Added to its greatness is the fact that it is actually called St. Mark’s Bookshop (not Books or Bookstore), a fact that I just discovered this morning. I love this store because it is small, rarely crowded, has an incredibly friendly and helpful staff, a cool East Village clientele, and in my opinion the best book collection in the city. Particularly strong sections include travel, politics, literature and food. It may be impossible for me to enter this store without spending much more money than I originally intend (yesterday my total came to over $60), making the greatness the store’s book collection perhaps its biggest downfall.
Whenever I tell people that my favorite bookstore in the city is St. Mark’s, they tend to reply with the same question “have you been to The Strand?” As far as I am concerned, this question is ridiculous. I love books, so of course I have been to The Strand. However, as far as bookstores go, it is not the best place in the city. I will give you that it has a larger collection than St. Mark’s Books and that it even has more books on sale than can usually be found at St. Mark’s, but that is where The Strand supremacy ends. The Strand is the perfect place to come to when in nyc as a tourist, and has a lot of the elements of many touristy places in the city-it is crowded, it is large, it sells shirts that advertise for itself, and it is loud. Now, I do not want to spend this posting completely rejecting The Strand. The bookstore brings lots of people from all over to look at books, a big love of my life, and it has a huge collection, but when I want to sit in a bookstore and quietly browse or when I want to be tempted by a large number of books that I actually want to read, I always go to St. Mark’s Bookshop.