Mast Books in New York's East Village neighborhood

New York bookstore Mast Books “has hit upon the right business formula in the right place at the right time,” writes Brendan Bernhard in a profile for the  New York Times East Village blog. “Unlike East Village Books, long a fixture at 99 St. Marks Place, Mast has the air of a used book store acutely aware it is in the midst of an intellectual revolution that has raised the image far above the word.”

The tiny shop — it’s only 450 square feet — has just celebrated its first anniversary, and doesn’t look like other stores: “With its polished wood floors, white walls, track lighting, and eye-catching display tables, it doesn’t look ‘used’ or ‘second-hand’ in the slightest. On the contrary, it is designed to evoke a small art gallery and to attract similarly chic crowds, although its strong neighborhood ethos prevents it from feeling in any way exclusionary.”

But of course, there are other shops in New York that look like that — our own, for one. What really makes is owner Bryan Leitgeb‘s attitude, says Bernhard:

“For me, it’s about loving the books as objects as much as for their content,” he says, and that, surely, is the crux of the matter. With e-books proliferating, Mr. Leitgeb realizes books are increasingly prized as artifacts – for their design, vintage, rarity. “If I put out a really cool little mass market T.S. Eliot paperback with a great illustration on the cover, someone might buy it as an object,” he says, proving that the old adage, You can’t judge a book by its cover, is now heading toward the exits. “I do think the book is being turned into a semi-art object,” he adds.

Interestingly enough, last summer Elle magazine’s Lit Life interviewed the store’s buyer, Robbie McDonald, and he had a certain amount of attitude, too:

How do you decide which books to buy? Brian (owner of Mast Books) and I just buy the stuff that we know is good. We’re both into books, and we both studied art. A lot of people bring in John Grisham, or those authors that are advertised on billboards. We don’t buy that. We focus on well-known authors, but we usually don’t buy the New York Times Best Seller stuff…unless it’s actually good.

All of which led to some heated remarks in the comments section.