Manhattan's Shakespeare & Co. E. 23rd Street Store Stops Selling Trade Books

by Kevin Howell -- Publishers Weekly, 7/1/2008 7:40:00 AM

Manhattan readers are losing one more bookstore this month when the Shakespeare & Co. Bookseller location on E. 23rd Street stops selling trade books and turns its ground-floor and basement retail space over to DaVinci Artists Supply. The bookstore, which is located next to Baruch College and the School of Visual Arts, will continue to sell college textbooks during textbook seasons.

DaVinci Artists Supply, which is owned by Shakespeare & Co., opened its first location in Manhattan in 2005 and last August, created a second location when it took over the bookstore’s ground-level retail space on 23rd Street. At that point, the bookstore’s inventory moved to the basement level.

A sign on the front door announces that all books are 30% off, but a trip to the basement finds only about 100 books languishing on mostly empty shelves. With three other locations in Manhattan and two more in Brooklyn, it's not hard to figure out that most of the inventory has been absorbed into other locations.

Repeated calls to Shakespeare & Co.’s two owners and president were deflected to employees at other store locations; those calls were not returned by press time.