John Scioli, owner of the Community Bookstore in Brooklyn's Cobble Hill neighborhood, has agreed to sell the three-story brownstone in which the used bookstore resides to a group of real estate developers for $5.5 million, the New York Times reported. Scioli, who is nearly 70, has a year to clear out the storefront and two years to vacate his apartment in the same building.
Scioli and his former wife, Susan, founded two Community Bookstores in the early 1970s: the first in Park Slope, and the second in Brooklyn Heights. After the couple divorced in 1980, Scioli kept ownership of the store in Brooklyn Heights (later relocating south to its current location in Cobble Hill), while his ex-wife retained the Park Slope store (which is now owned and operated by Ezra Goldstein and Stephanie Valdez). Scioli is estimated to have between 60,000 and 100,000 books in his store and has never implemented any kind of computer inventory system. Over the years the cavernous bookstore, with its ceiling-high stacks of books, became something of a community institution.
"You never know who might want something," Scioli told the Times. "Believe me, I tried to go out of business two or three times. I can't believe people still put up with this place. But no matter what I did, people just kept buying books."
