In an intriguing article for the New York Times, Jody Rosen discusses a fascinating but little-known bookstore called Monkey’s Paw, and gives ideas on how such businesses fit into today’s literary world. Here is an extract:<\/p>\n
\u201cLife-Spark Stories for the Intelligent Young.\u201d Attributed to the author \u201cR. K.,\u201d it tells the story of a \u201cbright little Life-Spark living in the heart of the great Lord-King of the Sun,\u201d who comes down to earth and embarks on a series of adventures. The Life-Spark meets Mother Earth, Nurse Destiny and other deities; it changes form, inhabiting various plants and animals \u2014 a pansy, a dog named Gipsie, a little boy.
\n…
\nThe Monkey\u2019s Paw specializes in oddities like \u201cLife-Spark Stories\u201d: printed matter that has fallen between history\u2019s cracks and eluded even Google Books\u2019 all-seeing eye. There are Victorian etiquette handbooks, antique sex manuals, obscure scientific treatises. There are forgotten 19th-century travelogues with sumptuous chromolithographs and leather-bound correspondence courses on fingerprinting.
\n…
\n\u201cThis isn\u2019t the store where you\u2019ll find the book you were looking for,\u201d Fowler says. \u201cIt\u2019s the store where you\u2019ll find the book you didn\u2019t know you were looking for.\u201d
\n…
\nYou could also say that the Monkey\u2019s Paw is an idea masquerading as a bookshop. It\u2019s a cross between a retail establishment and a conceptual art installation, which upends traditional book-trade values and views the literary canon through a cracked lens. It\u2019s a bookstore that argues that bookstores are, by definition, Dickensian old curiosity shops. \u201cMost booksellers can\u2019t adjust to the postprint era,\u201d Fowler says. \u201cThe only way to sell books in the 21st-century is as artifacts. I\u2019m a 20th-century person myself, but with Monkey\u2019s Paw, I\u2019ve tried to adapt. This place is a church of print. It\u2019s just that the old rules are a bit scrambled.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n