We're getting books every day. Here is a shipment blocking Rue des Nesles in Paris. A half a ton of Art, Architecture, Photography, Design and Literature from the Continent!

December 8, 2022
PRESS RELEASE

MERCER STREET BOOKS BEGINS PUBLISHING COMPANY

Mercer Street Books, a cultural institution in New York City for more than thirty years, is announcing that it has added publishing to its credits. “Writers browse used bookstores, and they like to talk,” explained founder and proprietor Wayne Conti. “I started to realize that many well published authors have really good works sitting in a drawer, or on a hard drive, and I started asking them more about them.”

The more Wayne saw, the more he started to think of becoming a publisher himself, all in the fine old tradition. He was well aware that many bookstores had become publishers: City Lights, Gotham Book Mart, certainly Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company in Paris, and even going back to 1705 with John and Elizabeth Nutt in London.

“Authors were standing right in front of me,” Wayne realized. “I asked them what they thought of the idea of Mercer Street Books Publishing.” Now he has several novels, a collection of plays and a collection of short stories, “All coming from established authors with enough solid, published work to fill a bookshelf.”

The first book, published in August, is MY ONLINESS AND OTHERS, a collection of plays by Robert Lyons, founding artistic director of the venerated New Ohio Theater, newly on Christopher Street. The next title will be PARTY OF PICTURES, a novel by Thomas McGonigle, recently awarded the Notre Dame Review Book Prize. PARTY OF PICTURES is a satiric look at the rituals of a Greenwich Village family. After that will be a short story collection (nine of them from The New Yorker) by Whiting Award winner Rick Rofihe. Wayne added, “I’m foreseeing another novel or two, plus at least one and maybe two books on Film Noir.”

“Basically, I wanted to publish books by writers who were a pleasure to read. There was also a tendency to favor subjects swirling around the creative process and downtown NYC post-World War Two,” he concluded.

Thus, New York City has Mercer Street Books Publishing, a new literary publisher in the old tradition: books for real readers.


PRESS CONTACT
Name:    Wayne Conti
Phone:    (212) 505-8615
Email:    pub (at) mercerstreetbooks.com

June 8, 2011
Painter Jack Levine passed away at the age of 95 last November. His paintings can be found in the permanent collections of museums around the world. Abrams and Rizzoli published major books on his work. His publishers took ample advantage of his own writing; Jack was also a clever writer and impassioned contrarian. The quiet force of his intellect could be felt in everything he did.

Mercer Street Books recently acquired his personal library, and we are displaying a large number of his book in a special "Jack Levine" section. We are presenting it as a mini-museum. You are free to come in and browse his collection. Each book is for sale. Most of the books are related to art, but others reflect the wide range of his interests. More of his books are put up each day. The intention is to give a feeling for the life of an important mid-century artist.