David Chen opened the shop in October 1987 with sixty-four books, an Olivetti typewriter, and a basement room on Mott Street he was paying for with money he had been saving to go to law school instead.
The store was called Antiquity Books for the first nineteen days. Then a customer pointed out — apologetically — that "antiquity" was already taken by a shop in Boston, and that the typed-up sign in the window contained a typo: Entiquity. David thought about this for a few minutes, then walked across the street and ordered a proper sign with the misspelling preserved. The name has been the name since.
For its first three years, the shop existed on used hardcovers David acquired from estate sales in Brooklyn and Queens. He worked the counter alone, kept a cot in the back, and slept there during the snowstorm of 1989 because the trains weren't running and he couldn't bear to close.
The fire
In April 1991, an electrical fire on the floor above caused damage to roughly forty percent of the inventory. What survived was wet, smoke-stained, or partially burned. David spent six months drying books one at a time in a warehouse in Greenpoint, sorting what could be saved from what couldn't. He sold the merely smoke-damaged books at cost. He kept the partially burned ones.
Several of those still sit on a high shelf in the back room, with hand-typed cards explaining what happened to them. They are not for sale.
72 Bowery Lane
The shop moved to its current address in 1994, took on a second floor in 2003, and added the rare room — a small alcove off the back staircase — in 2011. Maya Reyes joined as a part-time bookseller in 2013 and has been our head buyer since 2018. She is the reason most of the books are here.
We have, since the beginning, refused to do three things: stock anything we wouldn't read ourselves, accept advertising in our newsletter, and rush a customer who is reading. The third has cost us perhaps twenty-five percent of our potential sales. We do not regret it.
What we are now
Twenty-four thousand books. Two floors. A cat named Borges who has lived here for nine of his approximately eleven years. A monthly dispatch we mail to subscribers, four readings a year, a long-running second-Tuesday translation salon, and a standing offer that if you've read three books we recommended and didn't like any of them, we'll refund you the cost of all three and never recommend anything to you again.
To date, no one has redeemed the offer.