Tribeca Is Next Chapter for a Book Store

 by Etta Sanders


In three decades as a publisher and bookstore owner, Otto Penzler has probably navigated more twists and turns through suspense-laden thrillers and hard-boiled detective stories than anyone on the planet. But when it came time to move his Mysterious Bookshop from it's 26-year midtown home to Tribeca, he didn't have a clue.

Otto Penzler opened his Mysterious Bookshop on Warren Street last month. Photo: Carl Glassman

"I'd lived in New York for 58 years and I didn't know where Warren Street was," he said. "I didn't know anything about Tribeca. I thought 'my customers are never going to find me.'"

But Penzler liked the spacious, high-ceiling storefront at 58 Warren St. (between West Broadway and Church Street), and when he and his wife, Lisa Atkinson, walked around the area, "We fell in love with the neighborhood," he said.

And so Tribeca's newest bookstore, the Mysterious Bookshop, opened its doors last month. The floor-to-ceiling wood-faced shelves are filled with whodunits from the earliest Sherlock Holmes to the latest Michael Connelly.
Penzler says he has noticed a big difference in the atmosphere from the hustle and bustle and heavy traffic of 56th Street to the quieter streets of Tribeca. Here, he said, residents come in and introduce themselves. "It's so friendly here. I feel like I'm in a town in Ohio," he said.

He has also been surprised by the number of customers who come in pushing a stroller or holding the hand of a toddler, asking for children's books. In the midtown store, he had once stocked children's mysteries, but few customers asked for them. This month they plan to add a children's book section and eventually schedule story hours for kids.

Penzler, an animated man with neatly trimmed white hair and beard, began his life in mysteries nearly 30 years ago, publishing books under the Mysterious Books imprint out of a Bronx apartment. He was soon publishing such luminaries as Patricia Highsmith and Donald Westlake. His goal was to give the genre first-class status. "I wanted mysteries to be taken seriously as literature," he said.

With little space left in his apartment, Penzler and a partner bought a building on 56th Street. He knew nothing about running a store. "Now I had this building, I thought wouldn't it be fun to have a bookstore," he said. This past winter, after 26 years, his partner decided to sell the building and it was time to move.

As a publisher (The Mysterious Books imprint is now part of Warner Books), and as the editor of the annual Best American Mystery Stories, Penzler reads thousands of mysteries each year and has edited or co-edited nearly 30 mystery anthologies. He counts among his friends the mystery world's most successful writers.

The store's shelves are filled with signed first-editions by the likes of Joyce Carol Oates and Robert Parker, among others.

Michael Connelly will be in the store on Nov. 14 from 6 to 8 p.m. to do a reading and sign his latest book, "The Lincoln Lawyer," which now tops the bestseller list. And a character in Elmore Leonard's upcoming novel, currently serialized in the New York Times magazine, is named Otto Penzler.

The store also specializes in rare books. The most expensive, kept in a back room, is a first edition of Ian Fleming's "On Her Majesty's Secret Service," inscribed by Fleming to his mistress, which is priced at $15,000.

In addition to regular readings and events, the Mysterious Bookshop also plans to have screenings of mystery and suspense films.

For now they are just trying to get the last boxes unpacked, the e-mail working and let their customers, new and old, know where they are.

The welcome so far has been warm. In fact, unlike uptown, Penzler said, people from the neighborhood actually take the time to wish him well.

"Even if they don't buy mysteries," he said, "the locals want us to succeed."