Aeon Bookstore

Some bookstores make you want to buy a book. Aeon makes you want to start a whole collection. It's a few blocks south of the Henry Street galleries, and we almost always stop in when we're walking that route.

Head down the stairs, and the shelves weave between philosophy, literature, art, music, religion, and the occult. You’ll find Simone Weil near Susan Sontag, a volume on alchemy leaning against contemporary criticism.

It’s the kind of place where someone's reading Walter Benjamin before a gallery opening. OR Clarice Lispector. In the back, records wait to be played, not streamed.

Karl Bauer, Josiah Wolfson, and Benjamin George Friedman opened Aeon in 2018. The independent shop deals in used and new titles, plus records and tapes, bought, sold, and traded. The store grew out of the founders' longing for a time when the neighborhood was thick with these kinds of specialty bookstores, whisky was drunk, cigarettes smoked, and god was much discussed, and a wish to push some of that free-ranging quirk back into the city.