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I heard it first on NY1, but I didn't want to believe it. But Gothamist tells it true:  After 25 years of catering to actors, writers, directors, producers and just general theatreheads (like the teenage Bakerina, who was lucky enough to see, among other shows, Whose Life Is It Anyway? with Mary Tyler Moore and the original production of 'night, Mother with Anne Pitoniak and Kathy Bates), Applause Books is closing at the end of August.

Some of my friends and acquaintances have suggested that I have a habit of falsely romanticizing the past, and that I am taking an elitist point of view when I suggest that deep-discount bookselling as practiced by online booksellers and large chain stores might not be an untarnished blessing, and that there might be a price to be paid for cheap, convenient one-stop Christmas shopping.  I am not about to argue that New York was a better place to live 20 or 30 years ago; anyone who lived in the city during the infamous days of near-bankruptcy in the 1970's can tell you otherwise.  And I won't trot out the hoary old "in *my* day, you could rent a 6-bedroom apartment on Avenue D for $3.50 a month, and sure the building was full of serial killers, but at least we didn't have any damn yuppies in the neighborhood!" chestnut that inevitably overtakes any discussion of the closure of a long-term business.  I will only say this:  Once upon a time, for all its many faults and problems, New York was a city that had a bookstore for nearly any specialty:  theatre, dance, travel, business, boating, music; if you loved it, you could find a bookstore that specialized in it, and, in the best instances, fostered a community of like-minded enthusiasts.  Now these stores are finding themselves unable to compete in a faster, more discount-conscious, shrewd age, and they are closing their doors, leaving a void in the community that is difficult, if not impossible, to fill.

I will admit to a bit of a bias:  For 12 years, I have bought more books than I can count at the magnificent Kitchen Arts and Letters on the Upper East Side.  The staff knows me, and I know them.  The owner of the shop is tickled by my ongoing egg book project, and will spend an hour chatting with me about the best places to do research -- when he is not busy answering the phone, talking to food writers, culinary historians, journalists, or enthusiastic customers from all over the world (including Nigella Lawson, who writes in How to Eat that she has a habit of going out to dinner, maybe drinking a bit too much, returning home, realizing that the shops are still open in New York, calling Kitchen Arts and saying "What do you have that's new?", and then suddenly receiving a huge box and an even huger credit card bill a month later).  The store manager knows me so well that within 45 seconds of my walking through the door, he has amassed a stack of books and is asking, innocently, "Have we had a conversation about these, yet?", knowing that if I don't buy the whole lot at that moment, I will probably be back three days later.  This is a shop that has a lot of fans, and while it is doing well, there are never any guarantees for the future.  On one visit, I saw a pair of young women perusing the table of new releases.  "Oh!," said one of the women, picking up a new celebrity chef cookbook, "I want this one!"  Her friend looked over and clicked her tongue.  "Oh, you don't want to pay that.  Wait until you get home and you can get it from Amazon for 30% off.  That's what I do -- I find what I want in the stores, and then I get it all from Amazon."  I knew then that the store manager was a better person than I am, because he did not fly over the counter and roundhouse punch her, the way I would have.

Applause Books will remain open through August 30, for anyone who will be in New York for the rest of the summer and who would like to say goodbye and thank you for 25 delightful years.