Bibliophiles keep Westsider Books open for business in a changing retail climate

Westsider Books has the musty smell and sense of disarray that a used book store should have. Books pile high in every corner, even crowding the narrow staircase to the second floor. For owner Dorian Thornley, his store is the only game in town, and holds the unofficial title of the last used bookstore on the Upper West Side.

Thornley, originally from Blackpool, England, sits behind a desk on the second floor of the shop, peering at his computer through black-rimmed glasses. Business continues as usual at the moment, but he gives the publishing industry five years before the printing of new books comes to an end. At that point, he figures, physical books will become more of a novelty item than a means of reading.

“You can’t fight the future,” Thornley said. “What am I supposed to do—bomb the Kindle factory?”

Westsider Books began as a wheelbarrow full of used books for sale, later moving to a tiny storefront on Broadway between 80th and 81st streets. Thornley was originally an employee at the store, then known as Gryphon Books, and he eventually bought it with his business partner, Bryan Gonzalez, in 2002. Gonzalez and Thornley own both Westsider Books and Westsider Records, located eight blocks further downtown.

The Upper West Side used to be full of used-book stores, Thornley recalls. But today, their store is such an anomaly that Woody Allen chose Westsider Books as a setting for his newest movie, Fading Gigolo, due out in theaters later this year.

When not being used as a movie set, the store is filled with bibliophiles, some of whom come in twice a day. For diehard customers, Thornley says buying books is an addiction. Even so, the Upper West Side has changed a lot since the store opened 40 years ago, and his clientele is simultaneously more affluent and less academic.

Even newcomers are impressed with the tiny shop. One first-time customer, Mike Higgins, 30, whispered “wow,” as he peered up at the rickety ladder that scaled the towering bookshelves.
“They’ve never seen a bookstore like this before. We’re celebrated for being a holdout,” Thornley said. “We’re getting older, and the customers are getting younger.”

It should go without saying that you probably won’t find the latest bestseller at Westsider.

“We like to think we have a good selection of books here,” Thornley said. “No one raving into a cellphone, no lowbrow dreck.”

Instead, the shelves are filled with unusual books from people’s basements and attics, or even suitcases, collected over interesting, far-flung lifetimes. John Springs, an elderly man with a gray beard and gap-toothed grin, lugs a ragged suitcase full of paperbacks into the shop. He is a regular bookseller at Westsider, and claims to have once been a bestselling author.

“If you just come here, you’ll see something,” Springs said. “It’s real comfortable; they know where everything is.”

But being a book expert is not enough. Thornley says he tries to keep his store relevant by updating Westsider’s Facebook page and responding to Yelp reviews. What really keeps the bookstore running though, he says, is the location: on a main thoroughfare and right near the 79th Street subway stop. Plus, it doesn’t hurt that the Barnes & Noble across the street closed a couple of years ago.

“It’s a vocation. It chooses you; you don’t choose it,” Thornley said. “I’m selling books; what could be better than that?”

Photo courtesy of Samsung.

The Samsung Galaxy S III is just the thing to make Apple loyalists question the sanity in their devotion. Apple should do the same.

In 2007, when everyone was running around with RAZR flip phones in one hand and an iPod nano in the other, Apple gave us a sea change. Nobody who has ever bought movie tickets with Fandango, decided on dinner with Yelp, or wasted actual precious chunks of their lives playing brain-hole games like Angry Birds or Temple Run (e.g. me, sadly) can deny that the iPhone changed the way we interact with the world and with each other—by changing our understanding of how we could.

But, yo, people. That was five years ago. That thing caught everybody of guard. We were silly with it; remember? People paid $999.99 for I Am Rich, the arrow-pointing-up-I’m-With-Stupid-shirt for the new millennium. An app called iFart Mobile famously inhaled $10,000 dollars per day in 2008. iFart. iFART! Yes. We were silly, turns out it was all worth it, but we were super silly, y’all.

But now all that stuff that ooh’d and genuinely awed us is standard issue. So many people have smartphones that the New York Times actually thought it was news that a handful of contrarians choose not to join the fun. I wonder if they ran a similar article when that wacky Internet was all the rage. Remember that? I could Google it, but why bother?

What I’m trying to say is that unless the next iPhone is a G.D. spaceship, or transmogrifies the raw materials of the cosmos into Popeye’s famous popcorn shrimp, anything it brings to the table will likely be nothing new.

Will it have maps? Not Google Maps, which now runs offline on the SGS3, and all Android phones (lightning fast!). Will it have crazy good resolution? Likely. Retina? It would behoove them to do us the favor, but the SGS3 has an HD Super AMOLED (active-matrix organic light-emitting diode) screen which, at 4.8” feels a little bulky, but dang if that thing doesn’t look cleaner than Starbucks bathrooms in TriBeCa. Will it have Facebook? Instagram? Will it have…what? A camera? Will it have a phone?

It may be time to face the facts: the rest of the world may have caught up to the iPhone.

Now, I’ll say this, Samsung may have been being real smart and all, but they came super cocky with it. Not a good look, y’all. They seem to think that the coolest thing about the SGS3 is how easy it is to share pictures, music, or just any pseudo-tangible item made of up to 3GB worth of binary. Like, that is cool. Certainly. But it’s not easy. Not unless all your homies also have the SGS3, and even then it involves permissions and settings and really, nobody’s sweating that stuff when it’s already very easy to share electronic data without forcing friends to resent each other cause they had to buy the same phone (if you want to twist our skivvies, stick a USB on that doggie, dawg).

No. The coolest thing about the Samsung Galaxy S III isn’t htat it dims to save power when you look away from the screen, or that it’s got wild facial recognition capabilities, or that you can watch video on a pop-out player while multitasking. No. The coolest thing is TecTiles.

This: little squares about 1” x 1” or so that can be programed to activate whatever stuff on your phone. The example I keep seeing is that you can put one nightstand to activate your alarm just by placing your phone on the thing. But there’re tons of potential uses for these TecTile deals:

• Put one: on the door and tap to open your subway app;
• near the table and tap to open your morning news;
• on your amp and set your phone down to open your guitar tuner;
• bands should have one on the merch table so that fans can FB Like them
• businesses might have one on the counter for a quick 4^2 check in;
• put one on your wallet and tap your pocket to open your camera (HOT!)
• etc. etc.

So, whatever, is the Samsung Galaxy S III going to be an ‘iPhone Killer’? Maybe not, but not for lack of guns. This little buddy is about as good as they get. If you’re looking to buy a phone this summer, it’s a good time to go Samsung. The Galaxy S III has everything you need, and a whole lot of stuff you probably won’t even know what to do with.