A Woman Dreams of Opening a Bookstore, and Defying the Trends

After Jessica Stockton Bagnulo, 29, graduated from New York University with an English degree in 2001, she did what she was supposed to do, which was land a coveted job as an editorial assistant at a major publishing house.

She cried every day.

It wasn’t that Ms. Stockton Bagnulo did not love books enough. She loved them too much. Writing book-jacket copy from a cubicle, sorting files, “I felt so far from the things we were making,” she recalled.

Longing for the part-time job she had in college, at Three Lives, an independent bookstore in the West Village, Ms. Stockton Bagnulo returned to working there on weekends to cheer herself up. At some point she realized that graduate school in creative writing was not the answer (which was good, because she didn’t get in anywhere). “Gradually,” she said, “it dawned on me that the big, important thing I wanted to do was open a bookstore.”

In the age of Amazon and sky-high New York rents, that’s the kind of dream that works if, like Sarah McNally, who opened the McNally Jackson bookstore in SoHo almost four years ago, your family owns a successful bookstore chain in Canada. Ms. Stockton Bagnulo had no such backup. “I have no money, no trust fund, no wealthy relatives,” she said. “I don’t know anyone wealthy.”

Even if she did, her entrepreneurial dream might not look like the best repository for an investment: since 2000, about 75 independent bookstores in and around New York have closed, according to Eileen Dengler, executive director of the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association, a trade group for the tristate area.

Ms. Stockton Bagnulo decided that none of that should stop her. She built up experience at various independent bookstores (including, currently, McNally Jackson, where she is the events coordinator). A resident of Park Slope, she took a class from the Brooklyn Economic Development Corporation. Researching business plans for bookstores at the Brooklyn Public Library, she noticed fliers for a Citibank-sponsored competition for business plans, entered it — along with 200 other dreamers — and won the $15,000 first prize.

Meanwhile, a couple of neighborhoods over, in Fort Greene, a business group did a survey of residents in which 75 percent of respondents named a bookstore as their first choice for an addition to their retail landscape (which is already well-stocked with places where you can buy a $4 latte or a $150 bottle of wine). “We were hoping to find someone who owned a bookstore already,” said John Zeitlin, a member of the Fort Greene Indie Bookstore Initiative, an offshoot of the Fort Greene Retail Association, which conducted the survey. “But most of them weren’t in expansion mode.”

The group met Ms. Stockton Bagnulo after reading about her prize in The Daily News, and this week gave her a party in the lobby of the Harvey Theater at the Brooklyn Academy of Music to introduce her to the neighbors and enlist their help, financial and otherwise.

A tough week for everyone, it has been particularly rough in its own way for literary types, who learned on Sunday that David Foster Wallace had hanged himself, then opened up New York magazine on Monday to find a story about the book publishing industry titled, simply, “The End.” The Fort Greene party, given everything else going on in the world, felt like a pocket of irrational exuberance, even extravagance — a through-the-looking-glass scene in which an independent bookstore, of all things, was the cause for great optimism and celebration.

Sushi donated by a local restaurant owner decked a generous buffet table, and bookish volunteers from around the city — a librarian’s 20-something son, a woman who works for the book publisher John Wiley & Sons — offered the 300 guests wine (also donated by a local merchant). Literary stars from the neighborhood — Colson Whitehead, Jennifer Egan and even Jhumpa Lahiri, the book world’s Garbo — all showed up to offer support.

Halfway through the event, Ms. Stockton Bagnulo announced with glee that she had a business partner — Rebecca Fitting, a 34-year-old sales representative for Random House who decided a few weeks earlier to devote a sizable chunk of her nest egg to the cause of making the store a reality. Now they just needed a space, and enough additional money to give them the leeway to do it right.

A competition, a party, overflowing community support, celebrities of a sort, an energetic young woman prone to saying plucky things like “All I had was my ambition and my passion” — these are the ingredients of a story of someone realizing a remarkable dream, like crossing the Atlantic in a hot air balloon. That opening a humble local bookstore in New York has more in common with that kind of improbable adventure than, say, opening a dry cleaner is, in its own way, a depressing sign of the times.

“Maybe I’m an optimist, but I see the other side of it,” said Ms. Stockton Bagnulo. “Which is that only a bookstore can inspire this kind of passion.”