‘I try to make life a little better for people if I can,’ said the bookman, otherwise known as Mark Givre. ‘People tell me I’m the last bookstore in the neighborhood.’

By Kevin Deutsch

On a dreary morning last week, the bookman awoke bleary-eyed in his Kingsbridge apartment, packed up seven shopping carts and suitcases full of books, and, one by one, lugged and pushed them through the rain to the corner of Broadway and West 231st Street.

The customers arrived slowly, peering through the drizzle at the bookman’s two tables worth of fiction classics, French military treatises, pulp novels and works from countless other genres. They thumbed through pages penned by Borges, Stanislavski, Vonnegut and Steinbeck. Others went straight for the romance or Western sections, plucking out the latest by Danielle Steel or an old Louis L’Amour title.

All the while, the bookman doled out suggestions, summed up plots, and offered nuggets of literary knowledge with the expertise of a man who’d spent too many sleepless nights reading. Then, for $2 a book or three for $5, he sent customers away with promises of adventure, enlightenment or spine-tingling horror. For a time, caught up in the promise of escape between paperback covers, the bookman and his patrons seemed to forget about the rain, the blaring horns, and the long workday stretching out ahead.

“I try to make life a little better for people, if I can,” said the bookman, otherwise known as Mark Givre, a 58- year-old former food wholesaler and divorced father of one whose street corner bookstand is among the last bastions of literary small-talk in Riverdale and Kingsbridge. “People tell me I’m the last bookstore in the neighborhood. They ask for certain titles, they want recommendations. They treat it like a real bookshop, so I do my best to get them what they want.”

On a noisy block lined with street hawkers peddling everything from cheap perfume to knock-off handbags, Mr. Givre slings a loftier product: tales of political intrigue, ancient history, and some of the world’s greatest literature.