Talk Bronx New York

Bronx’s last independent bookstore to close

Paperbacks Plus owner Fern Jaffe will close her bookstore at the end of the month after nearly four decades in business.

After nearly four decades, a literary giant is entering its final chapter.

Paperbacks Plus, a Bronx community bookstore on Riverdale Ave., is set to close its doors at the end of this month.

“It’s been 38 years, time to let someone else take over,” said owner Fern Jaffe, with a good-natured laugh.

Jaffe and a friend opened the shop in 1970, seeing it grow into a neighborhood fixture that is touted as the Bronx’s only independent bookstore.

Over the years, Paperbacks Plus has hosted numerous book parties, drawing such big-name authors as Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison, Ed Koch, Pete Hamill, Frank and Malachy McCourt, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, Roger Kahn, Carol Higgins and Mary Higgins Clark.

And it became a vehicle for Jaffe’s activist streak.

“We were a real community bookstore. If there were issues in the community, we took a stand on them,” she said. “We put ourselves out there politically.”

When “The Pentagon Papers” were published, Jaffe sent 100% of the book’s sales to the Friends of Daniel Ellsberg, a group formed to support the U.S. State Department officer who leaked the secret government reports on the Vietnam War.

When Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwah against author Salman Rushdie and anyone who sold his book “The Satanic Verses,” Jaffe kept the book on her shelves.

Recently, Jaffe fought against a Patriot Act provision that would have required her to hand over lists of customers’ purchases at the government’s request.

“I used to say I should have been a lawyer because of all my activism,” she said. “But I channeled that energy into putting the right books into people’s hands instead. Books can change people’s lives.”

It wasn’t all heavy political statements though. There were more light-hearted times, too.

For instance, every Yankee baseball player-cum-author has held a book signing at Paperbacks Plus, including Yogi Berra, Paul O’Neill and Derek Jeter.

“Every Yankee player who’s ever come through here has been super nice to everyone, especially the kids,” Jaffe recalled. “They made you proud.”

A true Bronxite, Jaffe grew up in Mount Eden, went to Public School 70 and graduated from Taft High School. She moved to Riverdale in 1966 with her husband, Martin Jaffe, and their two children.

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Author Abraham Rodriguez delves into Barrio noir in “South by South Bronx”

A mysterious blond appears naked in the bed of an aimless man who has frequent blackouts. She’s got a pair of Manolo Blahniks, a secret and a gun.

This scenario would fit right in with the hardboiled detective novels from the 1950s, the ones starring cynical gumshoes like Mike Hammer or Philip Marlowe.

Instead, it’s the opening to Abraham Rodríguez’s new novel, “South by South Bronx” (Akashic Books, $15.95), which intersects concerns about terrorism, changes in the drug trade and gentrification with Hitchcockian double-crosses and a mountain of cash.

The novel, Rodríguez’s third, takes the Bronx-born writer’s longtime concerns about Puerto Rican identity and street-level realism and meshes them with the structure of a classic pulp fiction narrative.

“It wasn’t a conscious thing, ‘I’m going to do a mystery book,’” says Rodríguez, whose first novel, the gritty and lyrical “Spidertown,” was published in 1994.

“I always wanted to do something with a Puerto Rican cop, and I’m obsessed with the concept of dragging Puerto Ricans into Americana,” he adds over the phone from Northern California, where he began his book tour last week.

Tonight at 7, Rodríguez will be reading at Barnes & Noble in Tribeca, 97 Warren St. — the first of five book presentations in New York (see below).

“South by South Bronx” is divided into two narratives, set off by the use of different typefaces.

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The Bronx Library Center is a popular branch of the expanding New York Public Library system.

 An area designated for children at the Bronx Library Center.

NY Public Library Announces $1 Billion Expansion 

Last week, when the New York Public Library announced a $1 billion expansion, including a transformation of its flagship building on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street using a $100 million donation by the Wall Street financier Stephen A. Schwarzman, it signaled both a great opportunity and a great temptation.

It is a great opportunity because with such resources, what might not be possible? The library’s “main branch” (as I still refer to it), with its famed reading room, has become ever more alluring in recent years, but there is so much to be done to expand its majestic promise outward.

Not too long ago I stumbled away from a small branch library in high-minded despair; it seemed to specialize in stained paperback best sellers while shelves of classic fiction were stocked with scarcely more than “Oliver Twist.” Barnes & Noble, I thought, offered better browsing possibilities, and maybe that was why its stores seemed to be supplanting libraries as gathering places where books were read and conversations begun.

It seemed as if neighborhood libraries, like those that are part of the New York Public Library as well as the Brooklyn and Queens library systems, were doomed to become less compelling than a retail chain.

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