Today, I spent an hour and a half in the Union Square Barnes and Noble. Standing four stories high, and spanning over 154,000 square feet, it is the largest Barnes and Noble in the world. Recently, its staff unionized.
That is not what makes it remarkable though. It is, rather, its comical set of characters, called “customers.”
The following is the documentation of my people-watching and my encounters with such “customers:”
Lotta Old Men! Sitting with newspapers fanned out across their tables, a cardboard cup of English Breakfast, still-steeping, long cold, next to them. One in question sits next to me with an open copy of Jerry Seinfeld’s Is This Anything? He is about 98% of the way finished. This makes me wonder–did he intentionally sit in the B&N café with a book he’d already owned? Or had he been visiting the B&N café days, or weeks, in a row to read this particular book, without purchasing it? Either way, immense respect for committing to the bit.
A couple of Chinese tourists (not an assumption, they were wearing backpacks with the Chinese flag hanging off the straps) read their books. Respectively, The Return by Dick Morris–a prediction of Donald Trump’s victorious 2024 comeback– and an NYC guidebook. Their index fingers glaze along the sentences, methodically.
A man sits across from me, wearing a bedazzled trucker hat, paint-speckled shorts, and a mesh tank top. He is very kind when several people approach his table and whisk chairs away from him without a word. Not even the slightest consideration that someone may be meeting him at any moment. Where would they sit? No one does come to meet him. With a big smile, he flounces towards the YA section.
A (I’m assuming) houseless man intermittently reads a children’s book. Occasionally, he takes off his reading glasses, to look about the room. I desperately wish to sit across from him–maybe buy him a pastry, chat–but he seems to be at peace.
A man wearing a newspaper boy hat enters, theatrically shrugs his shoulders, and waves his hands at the sight of a wholly packed B&N café. Eventually, a man who looks JUST like Henry Winkler waves him over. He slaps his back as they go to sit with one another. What is this– the Broadway smash hit Newsies?
Please write the following on my tombstone: Jewish Grandmas! Me and the Jewish Grandmas!
A gaggle of pre-teen girls fawn over their literary picks (mostly gothic dystopians, but one has Emma tucked under her forearm) and their Starbucks Açai refreshers. I want to give them all a ginger kiss on the head and tell them everything will be ok.
The houseless man falls asleep at his table. His gray beard nuzzled down toward his chest.
A German woman sits to my left, eating a slice of cheesecake topped with muesli, so slowly, so lazily–I wonder if she may too, fall asleep. A piece of granola falling from her sleep-slacked lips.
Two girls, maybe college-age, sit across from one another, silently reading together. They have towers of books perched in front of them. They don’t give off the air of being native New Yorkers, so I imagine them to be foreign exchange students, studying through the summer. Spending this rainy day the best they can–in the B&N café hidden by stacks of paperbacks.
A man wearing a dashiki directs table traffic. Seriously. He is just a customer, but he stands in the center of the room–offering his search and pointing services to girls like myself. “There! A table! Sit down!!”
It’s crowded in the Barnes and Noble Café. I race toward the empty seat.
He volunteers his services with eager enthusiasm. He eventually sits at a table alongside four other men. Time for book club.
A toddler walks by, teetering, her balance off kilter, for between her chubby palms is a venti-sized mint-chip frappuccino. She meditatively sips, the forest green straw’s length forcing her to set the cup on the ground, so she can properly pull the drink into her mouth. Her cheeks puff out, full of minty-mocha bliss, as her mother swoops in, picking her and the drink up with one graceful maneuver.
“That’s not for you!” She coos.
The mother leans in to deliver a raspberry against the child’s cheek. The girl squeals with delight, only to be put back down on the ground, where she decisively runs away.
You either sit in the B&N café for fifteen minutes, or you are here–it seems–infinitely. You are a citizen of the Barnes and Noble café. Their general election is next Tuesday! Vote for Man Who Looks JUST Like Henry Winkler!
I am here because I had two hours to kill between teaching my morning class and working my shift at the Pilates studio. I am here because as I ascended from the Union Square station, I discovered a downpour awaiting me.
I am here because while I adore an indie bookstore–sometimes you have to settle for the behemoth across the street.
I’m not a usual customer of Barnes and Noble.
When I do buy physical books these days–it is from my favorite bookshops:
Book Club in the East Village
Three Lives and Co in the West Village (Shout out to Lucas, who lets me talk his ear off when I’m there)
Books Are Magic in BK (Shout out to Jules, read her substack!)
I don’t buy many books anymore though. Mostly I read library books on my iPad, which I will be the first to admit, is deeply satisfying. But it does save me from depleting my bank account through way of hardcover fiction.
I repeat to myself as I enter the faux-french doors: IAMNOTBUYINGIAMBROWSING.
NOTBUYINGBROWSING! Ooooo Buy One Get One, on paperbacks! (I walk out with Nora Ephron’s I Hate My Neck and James Joyce’s Dubliners.)
The Barnes and Noble café is a deeply cozy place, despite their use of fluorescent lighting and tiled floors. It is a familiar place for me. A nostalgic homecoming.
As a kid, I spent endless hours within the hallowed aisles of B&N’s.
You see, my mother is a writer, yes, but she is also an avid book collected
With her extensive knowledge of publishing and literary trends, she’d traverse through B&N’s labyrinth with the intention to take the most valuable, and undervalued, off their hands.
“They have a signed copy of Brain Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret, first edition, first printing sitting on the bottom shelf of POP LIT?! My GOD!”
We’d take them home, clean them of dust, and rid them of the garish “50% Off” stickers that stained their otherwise flawless covers.
On any road trip we took, we stopped at a Barnes and Noble. The ones in the poorest counties had the most inventory. (ok, I’m crying)
Any errand we’d run–whoops we ended up at Barnes and Noble. My favorite one was next to the Patrick Henry Mall; I could coax her into taking me to Aeropostalé.
Every Saturday, a B&N, and usually such a trip would culminate in a Starbucks frappuccino for myself, and a backseat full of novellas, non-fictions, ghost-written celebrity memoirs, maybe Penguin’s Clothbound Classics.
I learned the anatomy of a Barnes and Noble by rote like most kids would learn their multiplication tables. ( I never really got around to those…)
I started finding myself uncomfortable when NOT surrounded by books. (I spent most of my hours in school learning the Dewey decimal system and reshelving with the librarians. Probably why I never got to multiplication.)
I am stirred from my walk down memory lane by a shockingly loud thud. The houseless man stirs awake, the German woman blinks out of her cheesecake trance. The book club turns their heads, the toddler stops in her tracks, the Newsie and Henry Winkler audibly gasp.
The old man next to me has finished Jerry Seinfeld’s biography. He has slammed it shut, and now wide-eyed, observes the looks he’s garnered with his dramatics.
“Sorry!” He shouts into the echoey room. The café returns to stasis.
He turns to me, as an aside, “farkakte ending.”
I smile. “Aren’t they all?”
He tilts his head to the side, nodding, and gives a half smile.
With that, he slides from his seat, picks up his whalebone cane, and starts to creep towards the down escalators.
“I remember when these were stairs!” He says, to no one at all.
As he descends, he looks back towards the café, waving solemnly. With his wrinkled tweed three-piece tweed suit, bowler hat, and all-around ‘I’m at death’s door’ disposition, it’s like watching someone wave from the deck of the Titanic.
I give him a pitiful wave back, totally unsure if I’m the one to whom he’s waving.
“There he goes–” The man in the dashiki is back, right over my shoulder now, watching the man leave too.
