Just read on Racked that there’s a new bookstore in Dumbo called Melville House at 145 Plymouth Street at Pearl Street. A bookstore opening? How refreshing.

The store is part of Melville House Publishing, the publishers who put out a well-designed series of novellas, which I just love. I already have Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville, The Dead by James Joyce, First Love by Turgenev. I bought them at the Brooklyn Book Festival.

Here’s their blurb:

Melville House Publishing is a new, independent publishing house
founded in Hoboken, New Jersey, which is also known as the Left Bank of
New York City, and which is where Marlon Brando said to Eve Marie Saint
(in "On the Waterfront," which was shot in Hoboken), "Come on, I’ll
walk you home. There are a lot of guys around here with only one thing
on their mind." As it turns out, what’s on the mind of a lot of those
men — and local women, too — is good, solid literature, especially
literary fiction, non-fiction and poetry. In an amazing coincidence,
this is exactly what Melville House provides. Except now it provides it
from an entirely new location — Brooklyn. Yes, the Real Left Bank.
Well, except for the Other Real Left Bank, of course. We’re in the
neighborhood known as DUMBO, to be exact. With a spiffy bookshop to
boot. So, to review, that’s DUMBO, D-U-M-B-O. Remember the "O," or it’s
just dumb. And where would you be without the O? In the river, that’s
where.