Last year’s Lit Crawl stopped at the Zombie Hut. Where will it go this time? Via FB.

Last year, San Francisco’s beloved Litquake finally brought its huge, free and fairly prestigious Lit Crawl to Brooklyn, which  was long overdue seeing as Brooklyn loves books like SF loves saying “hella.” If you missed last year’s event (seeing as it was one of the busiest weekends ever), which featured Amy Sohn, Mark Haddon and many others doing readings in groovy bars, bookstores and shops, fear not, because it’s coming back on May 18! Planning is underway so we don’t know who will be there yet, but the organizers are looking for your suggestions of bars in the Carroll Gardens/Cobble Hill area (arguably the most literary quadrant of the borough?) where events can be held. And there’s more! (more…)

Thirst for knowledge gets a whole new meaning at Molasses. Photo by Paul Ker.

Molasses Books finally has its beer and wine license! Bushwick’s barter-based bookstore, which has been open since July, promises “books that [don’t] suck” at prices within the $5-8 range. Used bookstores are nothing new, so what’s the hook? As we mentioned over the summer, at Molasses, you can trade your used books for coffee, or if you’d prefer, for more books. Since its inception, there’s been a promise on behalf of owner Matthew Winn that patrons would eventually be able to swap their books for a tab for beer and wine, and ladies and gentlemen, that day is finally here. (more…)

Owner Matthew Winn dishes the lattes and literature. Photos by Paul Ker.

Bushwick finally has a bookstore! Molasses Books, which opened at 770 Hart St. late last month, is built for lingering. Affordable is the key element, with “the average book that doesn’t suck being in the $5-8 range,” owner Matthew Winn tells us. The extra bonus is the barter system: you can trade books for coffee (or more books), and eventually beer and wine.

“If you come with a great stack of new books and want a $30 coffee tab? Cool,” Winn says. He estimates that within two months Molasses will have a tavern license (for beer and wine). The shop is a nice alternative to pricey rare book shops and vintage retailers smattering north Brooklyn and beyond. (more…)

Stephanie is leaving all this behind. Via BitchcakesNY.

Looks like it’s jobs week here at Brokelyn. Stephanie Anderson, manager of Greenpoint’s Word bookstore, is leaving at the end of June to take a job at a public library in Connecticut. Which means you can apply for her job to live out your Meg-Ryan-You’ve-Got-Mail fantasies of running a cute bookstore in a quaint neighborhood. And since the shop seems to be doing quite well, you won’t get that whole chased-out-of-business-by-Tom-Hanks part.  (more…)

Not you too Ikea. Not you too.

With all the recent hubbub about the fate of indie bookstores (especially the sniping over a petition to save the city’s St. Marks Books), you’d think we’re nearing a critical choke point in the industry’s future. Discount furniture embassy Ikea is already betting against the printed book. The Economist reports Ikea is releasing a new, deeper version of its popular $50 “Billy” bookcase designed more as decoration to hold “ornaments, tchotchkes and the odd coffe-table-tome” — but not, notably, ye olde ink-and-paper bundles of words. Have you ever tried putting books on a too-big shelf? It messes up your whole literary feng shui! I can’t put Tom Wolfe behind Thomas Wolfe; they’d never get along! Also, some of us think pretty shelves packed with intriguing spines promising endless adventures is great decoration on its own, right? What say you?

We’ll leave it up to you to decide whether you want to continue feeding the last mega book retailer beast or keep supporting your local, but today only, you can get 50 percent off 200 hardcover fiction best-sellers at Barnes & Noble online. You can also check out MyPoints Barnes and Noble Coupons for cheaper prices.That means steep discounts on Game of Thrones, Lev Grossman, Tom Perrotta, those True Blood novels, James Patterson, Clive Cussler, Michael Savage and tons of other stuff your dad would probably like. You can get the same deal on kids/teen fiction today too (Hunger Games!).

Snow is free, and kind of romantic. Photo by David Minder.

Let’s face it: dating is expensive and there’s no guarantee of ROI. So why spend a bundle to make a good impression when you can be a cheap date who doesn’t seem cheap? Any dolt can come up with dinner and a movie (bye bye, $100), but being cash-challenged requires you to be a bit more resourceful and creative with your game. Here are a few things to do and places to go to help you kick off the year with a bit more swagger, if not a bigger wallet: (more…)

Pair free drinks or some food with a concert, screening, book-reading, really any good-lookin’ free event, and we’ll likely tell you to check it out. But when the whole thing’s about drinks in the food? Well, two words: Rum. Cupcakes. Tonight, Jun. 22, at WORD bookstore, food writer and recipe tester Lucy Baker will read from her new book (a must-read, we say), The Boozy Baker: 75 Recipes for Spirited Sweets. The eponymous Baker will share tips, tricks and, yes, tastes, from her collection of classic desserts made all the better “with a healthy dose of alcohol.” (more…)

The Community Bookstore. Photo by Annie Wang.

Back in the day, you knew your neighborhood used bookstore. Some of us knew all three of them. Now, these dusty, quirky, often-malodorous treasure troves of recycled literature are a rare, but hearty, Brooklyn breed. But if you know where to look, you can still find a home—and even make a little cash—for your boxes of yellowed, dog-eared pages. Or you can pick up a few of someone else’s. Here’s our guide to Brooklyn’s used bookstores—from dust to dollar-value. (more…)

From National Novel Writing Month to NYC’s First Independent Bookstore Week, November is building an identity as a month in celebration of the written word. And now, WORD bookstore in Greenpoint is inviting scribes young and old to express their love of our fair city in sentence form.  Simply write between 500 to 1,000 words on your favorite part of the city (the rules are open to all boroughs, but yours better be about Brooklyn). The contest is aptly named “Neighborhood by Neighborhood,” a spinoff of State by State: a 50-essay, 50-state collection from some of our country’s most esteemed writers. (more…)