Tonight: Manny Howard presents My Empire of Dirt!

Thursday, May 13, 7:30 PM
Manny Howard presents My Empire of Dirt: How One Man Turned His Big-City Backyard Into a Farm

Brooklynite and lifelong urban dweller Manny Howard took the locavore / urban farmer movement to the extreme: he created a farm in his eight-hundred-square-foot backyard in Flatbush, with the goal of subsisting only on what he could produce on this farm for at least a month (in spite of his wife’s dismay and his own skepticism of the trend).

Following up on his James Beard Foundation Award–winning New York magazine cover story on the locavore movement, Manny wrote My Empire Of Dirt to chronicle his struggle against environmental, familial, and agricultural chaos, and in the process to ask readers to consider what it really takes (and what it really means) to produce our own food.

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Tonight: Joseph Wallace reads from Diamond Ruby!

Monday, May 10, 7:30 PM
Joseph Wallace reads from Diamond Ruby

New York author Joseph Wallace, author of several nonfiction books about baseball, tells a distinctly Brooklyn story in his first historical novel, Diamond Ruby.

Based on the real-life story of sixteen-year-old Jackie Mitchell, organized baseball’s first female pitcher who struck out Yankees greats Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in 1931 (and was subsequently banned from the game which was supposedly “too strenuous” for women), Diamond Ruby chronicles the extraordinary life and times of a girl who rises from utter poverty to the kind of renown only the Roaring Twenties could bestow.

The novel is already a staff favorite and an IndieNext Pick, and Greenlight hosts a celebration of Brooklyn, baseball and storytelling with a reading and discussion with Wallace.

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The Third Place

Every time I pick up the free Edible Brooklyn magazine, I get a little jealous. There are so many people doing cool stuff in Brooklyn, so many that I haven't discovered or wish I had thought of first! But in fact, I think that Brooklyn's vibrant culture of locally produced food and funky independent restaurants is part of what makes an independent bookstore such a good idea here. Brooklynites value the quirky, the independent, the idiosyncratically local -- and they understand the ethical and cultural reasons for valuing locally grown produce as well as locally owned businesses, in order to decrease our environmental impact AND support local, sustainable economies. As indie booksellers, the foodies are our comrades.


The most recent issue of Edible Brooklyn has an article on Red Hook cafe/bar Fort Defiance (pictured above), which talks about the idea of the "third place" -- something Greenlight hopes to embody. As owner St. John Frizell eloquently describes it (referencing Ray Oldenberg's famous book The Great Good Place), it is

"that place between home and work that has existed in every human society, where one can interact with people who aren’t family or coworkers, meet new people, get community news. In early rural America, it might be the feed store; in France, the café; in Germany, the beer garden; in China, the teahouse. Our society is suffering from the lack of good third places."

At Book Expo back in June, I spoke on a panel called "Bookstore as the Third Place: Making Your Store a Community Center Through Innovative Events." I was awed by my fellow panelists: Kelly Justice of The Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, Virginia, who puts together entire festivals involving authors, cooks, artisans, and readers together; and Robert Sindelar of (appropriately) Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park, Washington, who has a massive event space dedicated to events for (and often curated by) his community.

Obviously, a bookstore has incredible potential to become the kind of place Frizell is talking about, and that potential is something we actively pursue. I'm proud to be working toward the same goals as these other incredible independent business owners, foodies and readers both, to help create more of these places for our community in Brooklyn to come together.

(More construction news soon, we promise!)

Bergen Street Comics & Retailer Optimism

In my Friday ramblings around Fort Greene and Park Slope, I found myself walking home past the Pintchick Oracle on Bergen and Flatbush. Along with the usual weather report, this time it had information about the independent shops on Bergen Street between Flatbush and 5th Avenue. Some great new ones have opened up on the block in the last year or two, from a used-and-new bookstore to a girl-friendly sex shop to clothing stores of both the hip hop and maternity persuasions. I was surprised, though, to see the Oracle announce "Bergen Street Comics - Opens Friday, March 6." Um, today? I thought, a little Scott Pilgrim-like in my glee.

Today indeed, as it turns out. I went down the block and turned in at the Bergen Street Comics Sign. "Did you just open today?" I asked. "Just a few hours ago, actually," said the young man behind the counter. His name is Tom, and he's the owner. We started talking shop immediately, and he told me that he had long wanted to open his own comics shop, and worked at Midtown Comics for the last few years to learn the trade. He clearly learned his inventory there, but the aesthetic at Bergen Street is a lot more "high end", as a customer coming in after me noted: exposed brick walls, dark wood cases, none of the florescent lighting and cheap wire-mesh fixtures associated with boys-only comics stores.

I browsed happily, noting classic favorites (including an entire bookcase devoted to Watchmen -- smart move), and new finds, including a Vietnam comic called Guerillas and the collected Freakangels by Warren Ellis, which I'd read parts of online.

I ended up buying 40 dollars worth of comics (Alan Moore's DC Universe, since I just read Watchmen, and the Freakangels collection), which I can't really afford and could probably get cheaper through my day job. But it was too exciting to be buying something from a brand new store on its first day -- and I was hoping to help it be a good one. And he was giving out good customer service: when I brought up Freakangels in hardcover, he pointed out that "while he didn't want to turn down money", it was also available in paperback, which I did actually prefer. "I'm not a collector, just a reader," I said. "That's the audience we're hoping to serve," he replied. Good market research, I think.

Of course I had told Tom about my own ambitions to open a bookstore in Fort Greene within the first five minutes, and he was very encouraging. "If your experience is like mine," he said, "a lot of people are going to say to you 'Are you crazy? Have you noticed what we're in right now?'" -- i.e., a recession. But he said he'd also gotten lots of good advice and support from people in his industry, particularly a comic store owner in the Bay area. That comics retailer told him he'd opened his store in the midst of the Dot Com Bust, which was followed immediately by 9/11 -- and yet his sales had continued to grow every year. Tom and I agreed that it took some luck, and some business know-how, but -- well, you know. It's worth doing, and it's totally possible to make it work.

I left wishing Tom and Bergen Street Comics the best of luck. I kicked myself later for not taking pictures of the place on its first day, but I did save my receipt, so I have proof I was really there at the inception.

Bergen Street Comics doesn't have a website yet -- they're still putting books on the shelves, give them a break! -- but I look forward to following their progress, and welcoming another bookish institution to the neighborhood. We can all use more of Tom's kind of crazy.