“We always had our eyes on doing something in Bushwick,” says the alternative rock drummer Nat Esten, over a cup of coffee at Book Club, the bookstore-slash-bar he opened with his wife in the East Village, shortly before the pandemic. Now, the Manhattan pair are plotting their next move, into Brooklyn.

Esten tells me they’ve recently signed a lease for a new space at 380 Troutman Street, blocks away from the Jefferson Street station, across the street from the KCBC taproom. Esten says the pair are going to keep the place on 3rd Street, but also start up operations out of this second location on Troutman Street.

“We’re very much hoping to open by May,” he tells me. “Definitely by summer.” He says they are largely waiting on permits now. 

“It’s going to look a bit like this, though the layout is going to be different, but for the most part we’re trying to emulate the vibe of what this store is,” Esten tells me, inside the little converted cubbyhole in Manhattan that had once been a dive bar called No Malice Palace. Nowadays, it is a book store that attracts readings from local characters like gentrification chronicler Jeremiah Moss, and gets cited in trend pieces on “the rise of the book bar.”  In addition to being open in the afternoon, both the store and the bar are open late at night, closing at 1am on weekends. “Sometimes, you have a few glasses of wine and then you’re like, ‘I’m going to get that book,’” says Esten.

Prospective book perusers will also be able to pick out from a collection of $16 cocktails, like the “Murder on the Orient Espresso Martini” and the “Feminine Mezcal Mystique.” A “Cacio-22,” a riff on both the pasta dish and the Joseph Heller novel, appears to comes with “pecorino romano, black pepper, olive brine, olive oil,” in addition to vodka and dry vermouth.

On the shelves, the selection at Book Club, both the one in the East Village and the new one opening in Bushwick is all new titles — Esten’s wife Erin Neary does all the buying. At a glance, she seems largely to lean on the kinds of contemporary fiction titles, mixed with some trendy nonfiction, that you could find at stores like Books Are Magic or McNalley Jackson, pointedly places that are not in Bushwick.

Esten had moved to the city after studying drumming at Berklee and had drifted through the music industry while playing in Saved by the 90s, a somewhat high-profile ’90s cover band that Esten and some of his friends formed in 2010. On the band website’s “celebrity gallery,” you can find photos of Esten & co. with members of Salt-N-Pepa, the rapper Coolio and Pauly Shore. At one point, the group was fronted by Emily Afton, a Broadway singer. Esten’s favorite song to do is the Third Eye Blind hit “Semi-Charmed Life,” which he says the group play at every show and, indeed, they have named their LLC after it. In New York, the group regularly plays the Brooklyn Bowl in Williamsburg, where Esten tells me they are in fact playing this May.

Both Esten and his wife Erin Neary, who had been working a marketing job before turning to the bookselling gig, have “a strong connection to Bushwick,” says Esten. He says the pair have been frequenting nightlife in the neighborhood since moving to the city in the late 2000s. 

“We were still going to Pearl’s and Elsewhere, when they opened, and the Mirage when they opened; House of Yes, we love a lot of that stuff,” says Esten. “Spending so much time in Bushwick and seeing so many people who moved there when it was really cutting edge. A lot of people have put down roots here because it’s such an excellent place to live. It’s not necessarily a hipster enclave. I think a lot of people are there to stay.” 

It’s been over a decade since Bushwick got its first wave of bookstores, when Molasses Books and Human Relations, used bookstores both, landed on opposite sides of Maria Hernandez Park, both in 2012. (“Previously [Bushwick] had none, unless thrift stores count,” reported Brownstoner at the time.) In fact, Esten’s Book Club is going to be about a ten minute walk from either of them, inside a converted warehouse that, perhaps poetically, used to store wholesale copy paper. Its immense garage, once fit to load trucks, was converted by a developer into immense skylight windows, which now look over a landscape of other converted warehouses. It’s a neighborhood of bookstores now.

“We love Molasses, we love Human Relations,” Esten tells me. “I reached out to them, and I believe we can coexist. Got cool responses from both of them, welcoming me to the neighborhood.”

The Book Club pair aren’t the first booksellers to plant their flag in the neighborhood in recent years either. María Herrón’s bilingual Mil Mundos Books, over by Myrtle Avenue “operates as an activist and cooperative bookstore,” according to one report. Over on the other side of Maria Hernandez, Julie Wernersbach and Robyn Warren also recently opened up Hive Mind Books, where they told a local outlet they were “the first bookstore in Brooklyn to primarily stock LGBTQ authors.” 

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Top photo taken by Andrew Karpan.