Art Meets Life: Beth Parker on Searching for Red Grooms’ Mysterious Sculpted Bookstore

The artist Red Grooms has been just outside my periphery since I was a child, and I never knew it.

One day, not too long ago, my partner and I were at a thrift store in the Hudson Valley when a framed image caught our eye: The Bookstore, Hudson River Museum, Red Grooms ’07. As lifelong book nerd  and someone who has worked in the industry for 20 years, I’m often drawn to images of books and reading.

But this image was arresting, and really drew me in. A woman coming out of a bookstore with a pile of books in her arms, wearing a big, puffy purple coat—the bookstore window and bricks undulating behind her; there was terrific movement in this 2D rendering. I remarked that the woman sort of looked like Maya Rudolph. She looked like a person I could be friends with; clearly a book lover, someone who just had a lot of fun finding new reads in this unusual bookstore with a wavy door, books piled floor to ceiling.

Poster of Red Grooms’ “The Bookstore”

I also immediately loved the detail of the used books depicted right outside the door, “Nestea instant”–a used cardboard box with a nod to a sense of humor of the artist; the box cradling an overflowing pile of books ready to be searched through for the perfect gem—the perfect read.

Books on display in “The Bookstore”

This framed piece at the thrift store was priced a bit high, but since we couldn’t really find any additional information on the image, not even if it was still available for purchase at the museum, and we loved it regardless. It was even more of a mystery because the image didn’t come up anywhere on the Hudson River Museum website or gift shop page. Was it original? A lithograph? Just a poster?

Either way, it didn’t matter—it was an instant yes. Must buy.

Auspiciously, I grew up just one town over from Red Grooms’ famous Bookstore “environmental sculpture” or “sculpto-pictorama” at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, New York—where I certainly went to the planetarium for a school trip  at least once in the late 1980s, but don’t ever remember seeing their permanent exhibit—although I’m sure I walked through its halls when I was in elementary school.

Inspired by the Pierpont Morgan Library and Mendoza’s Book Company, an independent bookstore that was in downtown Manhattan for just under 100 years (1894 – 1990), The Bookstore was the Hudson River Museum’s gift shop for almost thirty years, and lives on now solely as a permanent exhibit.

When I brought the piece home and examined it, I couldn’t find any identifying marks making it a reproduction. Since I love an opportunity to do research, and couldn’t find a single, solitary image online of the piece I just purchased, I went down the rabbit hole, where I learned, among other things, that Grooms has had a love of bookstores, and was instantly inspired by the idea to make a 3D installation piece during the 1970s, specifically made for the Hudson River Museum when Yonkers (like New York City) was on the verge of bankruptcy.

When asked about the inspiration of The Bookstore in 1999 for Resource Library Magazine, Grooms said,

I think I was taken by Mendoza’s because it was such a warm kind of a cozy place, very; tucked away. I was also always attracted to the Morgan Library and the grandeur and Baroque style of its rooms. It just seemed that these two places struck a chord and provided something I could sink my teeth into. I liked the idea that I could mix the high end and low end with these two subjects.

I even went so far as to email both the Hudson River Museum and Grooms’ Manhattan gallery to see if they could shed any light on this image that had no online footprint whatsoever. I received no response.

I decided I needed to go back to the Hudson River Museum to see The Bookstore in person and find out once and for all if this artwork I had found at a thrift store was something original or merely a promotional poster.

So, on a cold and windy Saturday morning in April, my partner and I drove from Astoria, Queens to Yonkers, NY and walked into the museum on Warburton Ave (a street so incredibly associated with my youth since it connected to the street in my hometown), and absolutely reveled in exploring The Bookstore in all of its aging and hilarious glory.

The figures who populate the bookstore are extraordinary and interesting. The books that line the shelves and the table have titles like The Glossy Rats; The Navy Has Wings, and Paint O’Clock. Real books depicted (that are unlikely to be published today) included No He’s Not a Monkey, He’s an Ape, and He’s My Son, Design by Accident; and Divorce Yourself.

There is a sign on a pedestal in the middle of the exhibit: “The Bookstore is a Hudson River Museum treasure and it is very fragile. Please do not touch.” The Bookstore, in its current form, certainly shows its age.

And in the catalog that the museum produced in 2008 for the thirtieth anniversary of The Bookstore, and retrospective exhibit on Red Grooms, says, “The Bookstore served as the museum’s gift shop for nearly three decades…[it] inevitably began to suffer the ravages caused by its popularity, as Grooms had come to expect with his environments. Surfaces were scratched and paint chipped….”

Some restoration, thankfully, was done when it became its own exhibit. However, Grooms is quoted as saying “An artist can overwork a thing—you can ruin the delicacy of a past moment very easily…I think it’s better to keep it like it was—primitive in that way.”

The Bookstore is truly unique, a book-lovers’ dream, and absolutely worth visiting in person. I’m thrilled I discovered it via the image at that thrift store that day. Did I overpay for the artwork in a fit of giddiness in discovering a new (to me) artist? One might say so, as it is, indeed, a poster that you can purchase for $14.99 in the gift shop. But in our home, displayed on our walls, I think it just might be a priceless treasure.