“I can sit there and drink a nice Irish coffee and hang out with my wife while she reads,” Joseph Czyzewski told me while grabbing a beverage inside the newest location of Book Club Bar (380 Troutman St.) which finally opened its second location this weekend, off the Jefferson L station. Donning an enormous fedora and telling me that he “does real estate in Williamsburg” for the Corcoran Group, Czyzewski said, “I love this neighborhood.” 

He was far from the only man at the opening of the new bookstore-slash-bar who looked like he belonged in a fedora, even if he was among the few brave enough to put one on. In the back of the room, a tall man named Andrew Marks, a personal trainer most days of the week, was DJing quietly next to his wife near the store’s children’s and gift section. There were picture books like Zohran Walks New York and novelty socks with maxims like “It’s Always Okay To Buy More Books,” “Mentally, I’m At The Cottage” and “I <3 Hot Dogs.” 

Joseph Demes had been general manager of the bar since about last year, though the place hadn’t opened until this past weekend. He was dressed midway between a 2000s movie buccaneer and a curiously coiffed pit boss. 

“It was literally getting the inspections scheduled, that was it,” Demes told me about the wait to open the spot, which had been announced over a year ago. He had come on from a term of service helping open P&T Knitwear, the SoHo bookstore run by the corporate lobbyist Bradley Tusk, which I once misidentified on a date as a distant southern outpost of the Strand. Now, he was here.

“That was taking a while, but it finally came through. At a certain level, it’s not us, at a certain level, it’s what the city wants to do,” he mused. I asked how stocking this bookstore was different from the Book Club Bar that Nat Esten and his wife Erin Neary have been running in the East Village since the late 2010s. 

Bushwick would be a learning experience, but Demes has already scoped out some of the local spots.   

“A lot of it is what we have in the East Village. The thing is, we’re going to have to see what sells and then we’ll adjust. Apart from the small press section, we haven’t bought with the idea in mind that we’re trying to predict what would sell here. We want to augment what the used bookstores here have, and their focus is often on smaller and mid-size presses, so we have bought a lot of stuff from, like Ugly Duckling. So once we have our feet wet, we’ll treat the buying from an idea of what will sell well.” 

I ran into Neary, who told me this place already has “a much bigger poetry section.”  

“We spent a lot of time in this neighborhood and it doesn’t have another broad, general bookstore. There’s some smaller, speciality stores, or a mix of used and new, so it just seemed like the type of space that would fit well, without stepping on the toes of another bookstore.”

Nat Esten, who I talked to over a year ago about the opening, and who still drums in a touring cover band called Saved by the 90s, chimes in about his own outreach to other local bookstores like Human Relations (1067 Flushing Ave.), part of the extensive network of used bookstores in Brooklyn and SoHo run by the Book Thug Nation people in Williamsburg (RIP), and Hive Mind (219 Irving Ave.), which opened last year down the street and advertises itself as “Brooklyn’s First Queer Bookstore and Coffee Shop.” 

“We reached out when we first were looking in this area and said: ‘Hey, we come in peace,’ and we got positive responses,” says Esten. 

Somewhere in the crowd was “a book influencer on Instagram,” a writer for Publisher’s Weekly was telling me, herself a veteran of the hardcore scene around Amherst. 

“People think PW is this dusty old trade publication, but there is a new generation of people there changing it. We’re making it more expansively about what trade reporting can be,” she was telling me. She told me she was already pitching her editor on a party-reporting column, from herself, that would hopefully get approved. “I love Basement,” she said. 

“There’s not really much of one,” the writer O.F. Cieri, author of numerous small press titles like Lord of Thundertown and Lockdown Laureate, told me when I asked her about the area’s literary scene, after some years of living in Bushwick, and later Ridgewood. She’s keeping an eye out though, and even spotted the writer Jackie Ess once. 

“But I know that they’re living here, even if nobody is advertising it. I have Jackie Ess’ lemon press. She posted online, like, if anyone wants this stuff from my house, come by. So I stopped by and picked up her electric kettle and her lemon press. I also know that there is an editor for HarperCollins in my neighborhood because they keep putting their ARCs [advanced review copy] up on their stoop. So, I have a whole bunch of those, too.”    

Demes, the manager from P&T Knitwear, tells me that, among his ambitions at the Bushwick spot is to run something he calls “Book Club Bar Big Book Club.”

“It’s a very silly name,” he says. “We would try to read four books a year, but larger books, like six-hundred pages and above.” I asked for his favorites. 

“I’d love to read the Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt, but I’d love to mix it up so it would be frontlist and backlist,” he said. “Right now, I’m reading My Struggle, the Knausgaard¹, which is too many books, but…Helen DeWitt’s stuff… we might do Your Name Here, that’s already a big contender for it. I’m listening to Anna Karenina right now too.”  

There were a lot of readers to appeal to, Demes admitted.

“We do cater to people who are doing genre stuff and people who are into niche things,” he said. “I think that’s the best way to describe us, we appeal to the broader niche and the more specific niche, even though that doesn’t make any sense.”  

Nevertheless, it felt true, whatever it meant. My friend, the barista at Foster Sundry (215 Knickerbocker Ave.) told me that her roommate, who shoots commercials for modest retail brands, was complaining to her about just this. Where can I get new books? Not just that woke stuff. Something different. Something new. And yet familiar. And yet. 

“The big craze was in Williamsburg and it ended up saturated. And everything is so expensive there,” Czyzewski, the real estate man, told me while still wearing his fedora. His understanding of Bushwick was relievingly ground level. It was nice to think about the neighborhood as a place filled with buildings.

“Bushwick is a large neighborhood. It covers a lot of ground. You could live a ten, fifteen minute bike ride away and be in the area with all the restaurants and bars and all the entertainment in no time at all.” He smiled. “You can live anywhere in Bushwick.” I asked how often he comes here himself. 

“If the L train is working², it’s often.”

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Photos by Andrew Karpan.

1. It’s imperative to always clarify. ↩︎
2. These days, the L train is actually very reliable, compared to the G line and most other lines. ↩︎