Community Bookstore

The story

The worn carpeting was only occasionally visible beneath waist-high piles of paperbacks. Community Bookstore opened in Brooklyn Heights in 1974, then moved to Cobble Hill in 1985 after rent spiked, bringing its mountains of donated books along. Owner John Scioli ran it for decades as a place the New York Times called suited to "treasure hunters and lost souls as much as bibliophiles." When he retired and closed it in 2016, New York lost one of its last true messy-bookstore strongholds.