Words by Aaron Rasmussen
Larry Gagosian has built a storied career on knowing exactly what’s worth preserving. This spring, the art-world powerhouse—who has lived in Amagansett for 35 years—turned his attention from paintings to pages, stepping in to purchase BookHampton, the beloved independent bookstore that has anchored East Hampton’s Main Street since the 1970s.
A voracious reader and frequent customer, Gagosian tells Grazia Gazette that the bookstore is a vital part of the community and that he “felt it was crucial that it was preserved.” While his gallery’s publishing arm has released more than 600 titles over the years—from art books to catalogues raisonnés—he plans to keep BookHampton a general-interest bookstore, albeit with an expanded selection of art and design titles.
“I feel confident that he will carry BookHampton into the future while preserving and protecting its almost 50-year legacy,” Carolyn Brody, who owned the store for nearly a decade, recently noted in BookHampton’s “Dear Reader” newsletter. “I consider this a win for the Village of East Hampton and the East End. In the face of strong market pressure, an independent bookstore will remain on Main Street. Not a small feat!”
Brody, a lifelong book lover who dreamed of running a bookstore since childhood, took action when BookHampton was on the brink of closure in 2015. “When I heard the news that the business was for sale, I—like so many others—was bereft and couldn’t imagine our village without a thriving bookstore,” she said at the time.
Last fall, Brody decided she was ready to move on from the ink-stained trenches, and whispers circulated: Would BookHampton now become just another boutique? Could an independent bookstore still survive amid the area’s shifting luxury landscape?
Watching closely was Jeffrey Seller, a longtime Hamptons resident and devoted customer. “I love the gesture of Larry Gagosian buying the beloved BookHampton,” he tells Grazia Gazette. The Hamilton producer knows well the fight to save a popular bookstore on the verge of shuttering. In 2019, he joined forces with Hamilton composer Lin-Manuel Miranda, Tony-winning director Thomas Kail, and theatre owner James L. Nederlander to purchase The Drama Book Shop—the beating heart of New York City’s Broadway scene that he first discovered in the 1980s as just another show business hopeful. “We need bookshops,” Seller says. “They are essential to civic life.”
Abby Endler, the fiction and marketing director of Hamptons Whodunit, an annual festival celebrating the best in crime fiction and true crime storytelling, wholeheartedly agrees. “I love the idea of a ‘third place’—somewhere that isn’t your home and isn’t your office, somewhere you can go to see a friendly face and connect with people in your community,” she says.
For her, BookHampton has often been that place. Endler, who also runs the popular Instagram account Crime by the Book, devoted to thrillers and mysteries, has hosted literary events at the shop with favorites like A.J. Finn, author of The Woman in the Window and End of Story. She fondly recalls the knowledgeable, welcoming booksellers: “It was a true delight to swap recommendations and hear from them about what they are excited about in the world of books these days.”
So, while much of East Hampton’s coveted Main Street real estate may be up for grabs to the highest bidder, one cozy bookstore remains—a quiet chapter where readers, writers, and ideas still gather.
BOOKS FOR THE BEACH
Crime by the Book’s Abby Endler is all in on this season’s most-anticipated thrillers. Her top pick: With a Vengeance by Riley Sager, a razor-sharp 1950s-set story that unfolds aboard a cross-country train, where revenge is on the itinerary. She’s also eager to dig into Our Last Resort by Clémence Michallon, a psychological thriller about two siblings who flee a cult and reunite at a luxury hotel in the Utah desert—only for their retreat to unravel when a fellow guest turns up dead.
Hamilton producer Jeffrey Seller just released Theater Kid: A Broadway Memoir, a moving reflection on growing up as an outsider and finding belonging through the arts. He wrote it, he says, for anyone who ever felt lonely, ashamed, or embarrassed—“to let them know that there is a path to finally feel whole and ‘inside.’” His top summer book pick? James by Percival Everett, a reimagining of Huckleberry Finn told from Jim’s point of view. Seller calls this new modern classic “a profound story of the flight to freedom” and a powerful portrait of “American suffering.”
