East Village Ink & Paper

East Village Ink & Paper has been a defiant outpost of literary culture on St. Marks Place since 1983, surviving decades of rising rents through the sheer loyalty of its devoted customers. Founded by punk poet Danny Vega, the shop occupies a narrow storefront packed floor to ceiling with poetry collections, zines, small press novels, and counterculture nonfiction. The rare books cabinet near the register holds signed copies of works by Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Patti Smith, all of whom are said to have browsed these very shelves. The store stays open until midnight on weekends, drawing a late-night crowd of musicians, writers, and insomniacs who treat it as an extension of the neighborhood's legendary nightlife. Despite the gentrification that has transformed much of the East Village, the shop remains stubbornly unchanged, a living relic of the neighborhood's radical literary history.