Brentano's

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~ the last words ~

There was never a Brentano's in Turkey and there was never going to be one. An English-language bookshop is a street address, and the whole value of this one was that it stood at 586 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and you could walk into it. What did eventually reach here was the catalog side of the same trade, first by mail order and then through Amazon, and by the time a reader in Ankara could buy an American book without leaving the house, the Brentano's name was a sign over a handful of mall stores nobody outside the US had heard of.

August Brentano arrived in New York from Austria and opened a newsstand in front of the New York Hotel on Broadway in 1853. He sold newspapers and foreign periodicals to customers who wanted things printed somewhere else, which turned out to be a durable business, and his nephews took it over and built it into a proper bookselling house. The Fifth Avenue store became the one everybody meant when they said the name.

The Paris branch opened in 1887 on the Avenue de l'Opéra under Arthur Brentano. It shut during the German occupation and was among the first American-owned businesses in the city to reopen after the Liberation. For most of the twentieth century those two stores were what an American abroad meant by a bookshop.

The chain peaked at 28 stores in the early 1980s under Macmillan ownership, filed for bankruptcy in 1982 and was liquidated in 1984. Waldenbooks, a Kmart subsidiary, bought three of the stores out of the wreckage. Kmart acquired Borders in 1992 and merged the two chains into Borders Group, where the Brentano's name survived as a banner Waldenbooks kept running. On 18 July 2011 Borders announced it had stopped looking for a buyer and would wind down, and the last Brentano's stores closed with everything else.

~ the record ~

~ 586 fifth avenue ~

The flagship sat near Rockefeller Center and carried the chain financially even through the bad years of the early 80s, when the rest of the company was losing money. Brentano's also published books under its own imprint for decades, which is why the name turns up on the title pages of American editions from the 1910s through the 1930s, including a long run of George Bernard Shaw. A bookseller that is also a publisher is a nineteenth-century arrangement, and this one held onto it longer than almost anybody.

~ the second death ~

Most retail chains die once. Brentano's died as a company in 1984 and then spent 27 more years as a sign over a few stores owned by somebody else, which is the shape a lot of old American retail names took in the 80s and 90s. The corporate entity goes through bankruptcy and a larger chain buys the trademark along with a handful of leases. The name then stays up over the door for another decade or two.

Under Borders the Brentano's stores were run by the Waldenbooks division, which by the 2000s was itself the part of Borders Group that was bleeding. Borders closed money-losing Waldenbooks and Brentano's locations steadily through the decade. By the February 2011 Chapter 11 filing there were very few left, and the July decision to liquidate took them along with the rest. Nobody wrote a separate story about it.

~ paris ~

The Paris store outlived the American company by 25 years. It closed in 2009 after 114 years at 37 Avenue de l'Opéra, and in 2010 an Iranian businessman named Farock Sharifi bought it and reopened under the same name, with roughly forty percent of the floor given to English-language books and the rest to postcards and gifts. That is a different business wearing the name, which is the usual afterlife of a good one.

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