Albertine Books is a bookstore in Manhattan, New York. Opened in 2014, it offers the largest collection in the United States of French-language books and translations from French into English. [1] [2] It is located in the Payne Whitney House at 972 Fifth Avenue, between 78th and 79th Streets.
In addition to its bookstore and reading room, Albertine Books hosts frequent public events and organizes French Book Corners in a network of independent bookstores throughout the United States.
Albertine Books is in the landmark Payne Whitney House that now also houses the Cultural Services of the Embassy of France, Washington, D.C. The high Italian Renaissance building was designed by Stanford White. The French government purchased the building in 1952, at the initiative of structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss.
The bookstore and reading room of Albertine Books were opened to the public in September 2014, with over 14,000 titles from 30 French-speaking countries. Albertine Books was conceived by Antonin Baudry, [3] former French Cultural Counsellor, as a hub for Franco-American intellectual exchange and was named after Marcel Proust's character.
The bookstore’s interior was designed by French designer Jacques Garcia, known for his work on the Chateau du Champ de Bataille in Normandy, France and The NoMad Hotel in New York City. “This is not intended as a retail place. It’s more like a grand private library, with nothing that you wouldn’t want to have at home,” said Baudry. [4]
The visual identity of Albertine was conceived and designed by Pentagram and its partner, Abbott Miller, and "invokes the connection between books, knowledge, and Enlightenment, with references to Parisian Art Deco." [5]
It is now New York’s only French bookshop and reading room, following the closing in 2009 of the Librairie de France, which had been a New York institution at Rockefeller Center for over 70 years. [6]
In addition to its bookstore and reading room, Albertine Book manages a busy schedule of cultural events. Its annual Night of Philosophy gathers dozens of philosophers and other intellectuals for 20-minute presentations that run all night long. [7]
To promote French literature throughout the United States, Albertine Books has started a French Corner program with a network of other bookstores in the US that receive curated selections of French and Francophone titles. Participating bookstores include Brookline Booksmith (Boston), Community Bookstore (Brooklyn, New York), The Book Cellar (Chicago), Seminary Co-op (Chicago), Alliance Française (Los Angeles), Book Soup (Los Angeles), Alliance Française (Minneapolis), Green Apple Books on the Park (San Francisco), Elliott Bay Book Company (Seattle, WA), and Politics and Prose (Washington DC).
In 2018, Albertine Books launched the Albertine Prize, [8] to recognize American readers’ favorite French-language fiction that has been translated into English.
The Strand Bookstore is an independent bookstore located at 828 Broadway, at the corner of East 12th Street in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, two blocks south of Union Square. In addition to the main location, there is another store on the Upper West Side on Columbus Ave between West 81st and 82nd Streets, as well as kiosks in Central Park and Times Square, and a curated shelf at Moynihan Train Hall. The company's slogan is "18 Miles Of Books," as featured on its stickers, T-shirts, and other merchandise. In 2016, The New York Times called The Strand "the undisputed king of the city’s independent bookstores."
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George Whitman was an American bookseller who lived most of his life in France. He was the founder and proprietor of the second Shakespeare and Company, which was named after Sylvia Beach's celebrated original bookstore of the same name on Paris's Left Bank. He was a contemporary of writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Anaïs Nin, and Lawrence Durrell, as well as a lifelong friend of the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
The Payne Whitney House is a historic building at 972 Fifth Avenue, south of 79th Street, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City. It was designed in the High Italian Renaissance style by architect Stanford White of the firm McKim, Mead & White. Completed in 1909 as a private residence for businessman William Payne Whitney and his family, the building has housed the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States since 1952.
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Noël Riley Fitch is a biographer and historian of expatriate intellectuals in Paris in the first half of the 20th century. She is the author of several books on Paris as well as three biographies: Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation (1983), translated into Japanese, Spanish, German, Italian and French; Anaïs: The Erotic Life of Anaïs Nin (1993), published in French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Polish, and nominated for the Grand prix des lectrices de Elle; and she is the first authorized biographer of Julia Child, with Appetite for Life: the Biography of Julia Child (1997). The Ernest Hemingway book, a biographical and geographical study of his Paris years, has been published in Dutch, the Cafés of Paris book in Dutch and German.
Tina Kover is a literary translator. She studied French at the University of Denver and the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and attended the Next Level Language Institute in Prague, Czech Republic. She holds a Master's Degree in Medieval and Renaissance Studies from Durham University.
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St. Mark's Bookshop was an independent book store, established in 1977 in New York City's East Village neighborhood. It was the oldest independent bookstore in Manhattan owned by its original owners. The shop, run by proprietors Bob Contant and Terry McCoy, specialized in cultural and critical theory, graphic design, poetry, small presses, and film studies—what the New York Times called "neighborhood-appropriate literature". It featured a curated selection of fiction, periodicals and journals, including foreign titles, and included unusual-for-bookstores sections on belles-lettres, anarchists, art criticism, women's studies, music, drama, and drugs.
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