The Group Portrait: Bookforum Was a Good Magazine

After 28 years, a beloved hub of literary New York closes its doors.

- Bindu Bansinath

THE BOOKFORUM OFFICE in Chelsea is almost stripped bare. Only odds and ends are left on this Monday in late December, the staff ’s last in the space. A yoga mat sits rolled on a cardboard box of stray titles. “Most of the good stuff is gone,” observes managing editor David O’Neill, studying the bookshelves mounted above the desks. “I’m going to take my big boy,” says associate editor Lizzy Harding, running her finger along a Berenice Abbott boxed set.

Launched in 1994 as a companion to Artforum, Bookforum abruptly announced its closure on December 12. The magazine published essays, interviews, and reviews, known for being one of the best venues for rigorous yet accessible criticism, the cool kid sibling of older publications like The New York Review of Books. If New York can still lay claim to a literary community in the age of the internet, then