After 15 years in the West Village, Bonnie Slotnick Cookbooks is the latest victim of New York City’s, and in particular Greenwich Village’s, changing retail landscape and rising rent, which also forced St. Mark’s Bookshop to move this summer and felled Barnes & Noble’s flagship bookstore dating back to 1932. The good news is a possible new home has opened up for the long-time out-of-print and antiquarian cookbook store since Jeremiah Moss’s Vanishing New York blog first announced her plight last month.
Despite a letter from her landlord at the end of October that he would not renew her lease, Slotnick told PW that she still believed that they could work out terms. After all, they had had shaken hands on a new lease last July. But when she saw her landlord two weeks ago in a parked car across the street from the store, she knew it was over. In a scene, which she described as if it were from an old movie, she went over to his car and asked about scheduling a face-to-face meeting. “Never,” he replied, and rolled up the window. “That’s when I knew there was no turning back,” she said.
Because Slotnick doesn’t do social media, she asked Moss to run a letter to customers. “I’m still here!” she wrote. “But my landlord has refused to renew the lease on my shop. Rest assured that I will find a space, you will find your way there, and I will make it as cozy and welcoming as the old shop.”
Slotnick also asked if anyone knew of a place to let in the East Village that they let her know. Almost immediately sister and brother Margo and Garth Johnston, whose mother, Eden Ross Lipson, was a book review editor for The New York Times Book Review, offered her a space on the ground floor of their family home on East Second Street.
“It’s almost too good to refuse,” said Slotnick, adding that it’s nearly three times her current space. Plus the Johnstons are willing to be flexible on the rent. Slotnick, who has lived in a four-floor walk up on West 10th Street for 38 years, currently leases a 350 sq. ft. space nearby. The new space, which is a little farther away, is 900 sq. ft. and comes with a 10-year lease.
Over the next few weeks, Slotnick plans to look at a few storefronts with big front windows, something that she had long wanted, but she said, “it’s more likely that I’ll go [to East Second] than anywhere else.” There are still papers to be drawn up and signed, and the space needs modifications to meet retail code, including removing the bathtub and the stove in the kitchen.
Fortunately, Slotnick, who has been selling out-of-print cookbooks and etiquette and housekeeping manuals since the mid-1980s when she developed the out-of-print cookbook selection for a New York City bookstore that she prefers remain nameless, has some time before her lease expires at the end of January. She plans to stay open through the holidays and then by appointment while she packs up her inventory.
And lest customers think that the books in Slotnick’s store are her own books that she ran out of space for in her apartment, she said, “Nobody walks into Macy’s and says, ‘This guy has a lot of clothes.’ I buy for my customers.” Her own taste runs more toward mid-century, from two centuries ago.
As for her plans for her current store, Slotnick said that she will post the hours on her website.
