The doors closed Friday on the beautifully vaulted century-old space that houses the Rizzoli Bookstore, only the latest in a long line of midtown book emporia whose steady mass extinction seems to so handily showcase the Death of Print. Just two weeks ago, the New York Times ran a front-page story specimen blaring the headline “Literary City: Bookstore Desert.”

That story probably drove a small flood of sympathetic customers to Manhattan’s endangered booksellers (St. Mark’s Bookshop, Bank Street Bookstore, and maybe certain branches of Barnes & Noble). But alarmist rhetoric aside, it was a familiar tale: Not about the end of reading, but about New York real estate — inexorably rising rents and the few businesses that can afford them. It’s a challenging landscape for anybody, but probably especially challenging for bookstores after all. The same Department of Labor database the Times cited, showing a nearly 30 percent decline in Manhattan bookstores between 2000 and 2012, also found Brooklyn actually gaining a bookstore (from 50 to 51) in the same period. Look closely at a few of those — as well as Manhattan’s hardiest survivors — and the city’s Darwinian, post-Bloomberg ecosystem begins to look less like a literary desert than a harsh but productive driver of bookstore evolution. Here’s how a few of the success stories have managed.

Read the full story in New York Magazine here.