Coliseum Books

» see coliseumbooks.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Coliseum Books opened in 1974 on the northwest corner of 57th Street and Broadway, a block from Columbus Circle, and spent twenty-seven years being the kind of general bookstore New York is supposed to have and mostly stopped having. Around a hundred and ten thousand titles over two floors. No cafe and no armchairs, just stock and staff who had read it.

Then the lease ran out. The rent on that corner in 2001 was not a bookstore rent anymore and the landlord wanted what the corner was worth. The store closed on 31 January 2002, which the Washington Post had covered two weeks earlier as a last chapter, and for sixteen months there was no Coliseum Books anywhere.

A Manhattan bookstore is about as far from my side of the world as a dead business gets. The only part of it I could ever have reached is the website, and that is where this one turns strange, because coliseumbooks.com is a far better record of the ending than it ever was of the store.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the second store ~

It came back in June 2003 at 11 West 42nd Street, across from Bryant Park and the main library, with Leibson behind it. Bloomberg wrote it up that May as a fighting-spirit story, which is what the trade press writes when an independent bookseller reopens in Manhattan in the year Amazon turns nine.

The new address never worked the way the old one had. Midtown on that block is office traffic rather than neighborhood traffic, and the people who had walked to 57th Street for thirty years did not transfer with it. The company filed for bankruptcy in the first days of October 2006.

~ the day it died ~

Leibson announced the store would close by the end of the year. It made it a few days past that. The last day of business was 6 January 2007, which puts the two closings of Coliseum Books five years and a handful of days apart, both of them in the first weeks of January.

~ the domain after ~

The site had always lagged the store badly. In May 2000 coliseumbooks.com was a single kilobyte: a 600 by 150 wordmark over the line "We are under construction, please come back soon." That was a bookstore twenty-six years into trading. A real site only arrived with the 42nd Street store, running about eight kilobytes with events and featured titles on it.

Then it stopped being a store site and did not stop answering. On 29 December 2008, almost two years after the last customer, the homepage was still up and still titled Welcome To Coliseum Books, with CLOSED set in bold twice over, COLISEUM BOOKS IS CLOSED beneath the navigation, the 11 West 42nd Street address, and a mailto link to [email protected] printed under it.

By October 2016 the domain had given up on its own history. It served 627 bytes reading "Error. Page cannot be displayed. Please contact your service provider for more details. (31)", with a robots meta telling crawlers not to archive it and Googlebot not to snippet it. Today coliseumbooks.com returns a 301 to an affiliate review of a book-summary subscription app, which is a joke nobody wrote on purpose.

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