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BookCourt, a Literary Cornerstone in Brooklyn, Is Closing

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CreditCreditHiroko Masuike/The New York Times

Bookselling is a tough business these days, but BookCourt in Brooklyn seemed destined to stay.

One of the foremost independent bookstores in the area for decades, BookCourt flourished, as did the borough, and it grew into one of the country’s premier literary hot spots. Its owners, Henry M. Zook and Mary B. Gannett, seemed to have found the secret to success after opening the store 35 years ago.

But on Tuesday, Mr. Zook and Ms. Gannett said they planned to shut BookCourt on Dec. 31, sending a gasp through its literary community and its Cobble Hill neighborhood.

BookCourt had weathered the upheaval of the bookselling industry over the last 20 years as reading habits changed and online outlets like Amazon rose. It withstood the 1999 opening of a Barnes & Noble store just a few blocks away and even outlasted the owners’ marriage.

But the store could not survive one fundamental thing: the desire of both owners, now in their 60s, to retire. “We know the store will be missed, and we are very proud of what we accomplished,” Mr. Zook and Ms. Gannett wrote in a statement. They said that the longevity could be explained in part because they had “invested in the neighborhood and the real estate which housed the bookstore.” Over the years the couple bought the two stately buildings that house the store on bustling Court Street.

Since its opening in 1981, BookCourt has hosted many famous authors who have stopped in the city for readings, lectures and talks, including Junot Díaz, Megan Abbott and Don DeLillo. And it has been a base for the writing community that has swelled in Brooklyn and a springboard for many lesser-known authors.

The novelist Emma Straub said she did her first reading at BookCourt in 2009, around the time when she started working as a bookseller and sold copies of a small-run novella she wrote at the store. “Lots of people I sold them to were editors that then bid on my novel later,” Ms. Straub, 36, said.

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CreditHiroko Masuike/The New York Times

Ms. Straub has had launch parties for all of her books here. “For me, there was no place more important,” she said.

Dennis Johnson, a founder of Melville House, a publishing company in Brooklyn, said he was shocked that the store was closing.

“They’re really supportive of little publishers like us,” he said.

Mr. Johnson said that in the early 2000s, Mr. Zook would sell books at a few of his events. “He said, ‘I’ll bring a load down and sell them for you,’” Mr. Johnson said. “I doubt he made any money.”

Mr. Zook and Ms. Gannett had opened the store long before the borough’s resurgence as a thriving cultural center and hip place to live.

Zack Zook, 32, a son of BookCourt’s owners, grew up in an apartment above the store. In the 1990s the block had overgrown vacant lots full of rusting automobiles. Rats abounded, he said, and some of the store’s workers had been mugged nearby.

“It was radically different than it is now,” he said. The vacant lots have been replaced by a Starbucks and a high-end grocery store.

The novelist Jonathan Lethem said the store also influenced Brooklyn’s literary boom. “To have a neighborhood bookstore like that was part of the formation of the character of the place as we now know it,” he said.

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CreditHiroko Masuike/The New York Times

Ms. Gannett and Mr. Zook’s statement did not say why they decided to retire at the end of the year, but Zack Zook said his mother no longer lived upstairs and his father had moved upstate.

“They got in early. They were able to make sound investments,” Zack Zook said. “Usually when you make a significant investment, there is some kind of return.”

On Tuesday, customers quietly perused the store. A woman with a dachshund on her lap read a children’s book in the window. A clerk moved his arms like a windmill to a song on the stereo. One man conversed about the suburbs as a clerk dusted the store shelves. The air smelled of hardwood floor and the pages of books.

“It’s just the sort of amenity people move to Brooklyn for,” said Betsy Sand, who had been buying books at the store since it opened. She recalled that after Hurricane Sandy, “this place was the neighborhood gathering place.”

Nationally, statistics indicate that independent bookselling is on the rise. The American Booksellers Association, which represents independent booksellers, said its membership included more than 2,300 stores in 2016, up from 1,651 in 2009.

And a couple of Brooklyn-based stores have even expanded. Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene, which opened in 2009, added a shop in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens last month. Word, in Greenpoint, opened an outpost in Jersey City.

Ms. Straub and her husband plan to open a bookstore, a decision that came to them after learning BookCourt was closing. First, they asked Mr. Zook and Ms. Gannett to let them take over the store. “But that didn’t work out,” Ms. Straub said. Instead, they will try to open a store nearby.

“We decided that we couldn’t stomach living in a neighborhood with no independent bookstore,” Ms. Straub said.

Nate Schweber contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 24 of the New York edition with the headline: BookCourt, Brooklyn Literary Cornerstone, Will Close. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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