Larry Gagosian on his latest acquisition, a bookstore in the Hamptons

On a rainy summer Saturday afternoon on East Hampton’s Main Street, BookHampton is bustling with locals and tourists. For over 50 years, it has been the town’s go-to store for books, board games and literary events featuring authors such as Jennifer Egan, Colson Whitehead, Eric Ripert and Jimmy Fallon—or children’s readings by high-profile locals like Hillary Clinton and Alec Baldwin.

But some patrons have noticed changes in recent months. The front tables and shelves that once held paperback fiction now display thickly bound catalogues on artists such as Jenny Saville, Peter Beard, Willem de Kooning and Richard Prince. One series of Ed Ruscha catalogues is priced at $1,600. What do these offerings all have in common? The artists—or their estates—are represented by Gagosian, the other business of the bookstore’s new owner, art world mogul Larry Gagosian.

The 80-year-old art market mogul is a longtime resident of Amagansett, just one town over from East Hampton, which he has visited as a weekend retreat from his home on Manhattan’s Upper East Side for the past 35 years. Since 2014, he has also been a partner at Blue Parrot, a Mexican restaurant three doors down from BookHampton.

“You’ll often see him around, he’s like a local celebrity,” says Frank Newbold, a Sotheby’s broker whose office windows look onto Main Street. According to BookHampton’s previous owner, Carolyn Brody, Gagosian spent a significant amount of time in the store over the years shopping for books.

“I’m the kind of guy who likes to walk around town, and I always go into BookHampton, browsing, bumping into people. It’s sort of a community centre,” Gagosian says.

Required reading

Those who know the dealer well describe him as a voracious reader. One prerequisite to working in sales at his gallery is reading Duveen (1951), S.N. Behrman’s biography of the legendary dealer Joseph Duveen. Before starting his business, Gagosian earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature from the University of California, Los Angeles and spent much of his spare time at Free Press, a beloved campus-adjacent bookstore that was eventually replaced by a Taco Bell. “Not that I have anything against Taco Bell, but it really was a tipping point for the neighbourhood—it changed the character of the town,” he says.

Last autumn, when word got out that BookHampton was facing potential closure, a group of locals rallied to try to find a buyer. Susan Lehman, a resident who helped spearhead the efforts, says no one came forward, so they launched a fundraiser. “We raised hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Lehman says. In addition to raising funds, the campaign raised awareness and numerous potential buyers emerged—including, eventually, Gagosian. He recalls: “I said, ‘Let’s buy the business and keep the bookstore in the community.’” The sale was finalised in May.

The Hamptons, a stretch of Long Island’s southern coast that is home to some of the richest census tracts in the US, reached new heights of wealth during the pandemic as many Manhattanites headed out East. In 2020, the median price of a Hamptons home stood at $985,000. Today that figure has more than doubled, to $2.04m.

In East Hampton, retail has followed suit, turning the town into even more of a hub for luxury shopping than it already was. Since 2023, brands such as Chanel, Loewe, Louis Vuitton, Prada, Gucci, Cartier and Valentino have opened their doors. “Storefronts go up to $500 per square foot [monthly] these days,” says Newbold. In Manhattan’s popular Soho shopping district, by comparison, retail space averages $322 per square foot.

Gagosian, a notoriously shrewd businessman, is not bothered by these changes. “People always say [the Hamptons] is changing, and the implication is in a bad way. I don’t see it that way,” he says. “It brings more tax revenue into the community.”

For longtime residents, BookHampton has been a beloved fixture for a half-century. The founders, George Caldwell and Jorge Costello—often referred to as “The Georges”—established the store in 1971 as a town hangout. “If you were meeting for a movie at the theatre next-door at 8, you would go to BookHampton at 7:30pm,” Newbold says. It changed hands and sites (at one point there were four locations) a few times before it was purchased by Charline Spektor and Jeremy Nussbaum in 2001. The married couple, both involved in the literary world, added sophisticated programming and curation that established the space as a serious destination for bibliophiles.

In 2016, Brody, then a Manhattan-based city planner and philanthropist, took over. “I had a lifelong dream of owning a bookstore,” she says. She commissioned a renovation, hiring the Manhattan-based architecture firm Deborah Berke Partners for the interiors, and Michael Beirut of Pentagram for graphics and merchandise.

“Carolyn did a brilliant job of giving it a real sense of design,” says Ina Garten, another loyal customer who has hosted numerous events at the store. Some customers, however, felt that Brody did not have the same understanding of the literary community as Spektor and Nussbaum, and made the store too commercial. “Her intentions were good, but she didn’t hire people who knew about books,” says Spektor.

New look and new books

Some locals are concerned that BookHampton will drift further from its past glory under Gagosian. “I just hope it doesn’t become all Go-go books,” says Susan B. Caldwell, an East Hampton resident since the 1970s and fellow art dealer.

Others, like Spektor, are thankful for the change. “Communities need bookstores run by people who understand books, and from the few times that Larry and I have crossed paths, I know that’s him,” she says. “I believe he is doing this as a private person,” adds Annabelle Selldorf, the architect of Gagosian’s Manhattan townhouse and a fellow Hamptons resident. “He is showing support for something really important to him.”

Gagosian is not shy about the changes he is making to the store’s shelves. He brought on Douglas Flamm, the rare book specialist at his gallery, to curate a selection of gallery-affiliated publications. “For a long time, [East Hampton] has been home to many artists and collectors, so I want to bring more of that to the store,” he says. “But it’s not going to become an art bookshop, or a Gagosian bookshop.”

BookHampton will remain a general-interest store, he says, reflective of the tastes of readers like him. “I’m gonna have my antenna out for new and interesting fiction that comes my way, because I want to make the store more relevant and exciting for book readers in general,” he says. After reading a recent New York Times profile of James Frey timed to his new book, Next to Heaven, Gagosian instructed his team to stock the store with copies.

To those speculating that this marks the start of a Gagosian expansion to the Hamptons with a gallery to follow, the dealer says he has no interest. “I want to be able to relax out here and not think shop every minute,” he says. “I’ve got enough on my hands right now.”