I first visited The Mysterious Bookshop in 1989 when it was a dark, cozy little bookshop in mid-town Manhattan. I was quite tickled by the idea that there could be a bookstore entirely devoted to just mystery and crime titles. I wasn’t aware then of the shop’s rich history which draws from its famous owner, Otto Penzler. Later, after I had left the bookshop, I discovered Mr. Penzler was one of the most celebrated figures in mystery fiction publishing and that he owned one of the finest collections of rare and first editions in detective fiction – most of which are inscribed to him by the genre’s most famous authors whom he knew personally as either publisher, friend or as the field’s most knowledgeable bibliographer-anthologist.

The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City is one of the last bookstores in the world specializing in mystery and detective fiction. It is also one of the oldest and biggest. (Murder Ink, the city’s first mystery bookstore once located in uptown Manhattan, sadly closed its doors in 2006, as did Partners and Crime, the other specialist mystery store in Greenwich village).

The second time I dropped in on The Mysterious Bookshop was some months later the same year in the hope that I could meet Mr.Penzler briefly and have him sign my Mysterious Press copy of Vincent Starrett’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Starrett, a great bookman who had once assembled, in the 30s, the greatest collection of Sherlockiana, had been the inspiration behind The Baker Street Irregulars. The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes was the first scholarly study of the world’s first consulting detective.

Owing to Otto Penzler’s deep interest in Sherlockiana, The Mysterious Bookshop also specializes in Conan Doyle material. If you want more than just reading copies of mystery, crime and detective titles, this bookstore is a good place to be: its shelves are filled with collectibles for reasonable prices, in the range of $15 to $50 dollars –not a bad price to pay for a collectible when copies can start at $100 and go up to $500.

Though it had been a busy day, Mr.Penzler very graciously agreed to see me for a few minutes. I told him I had come all the way from India to his bookstore in the manner not unlike that of a mystery fan making a pilgrimage to a shrine. He was suitably impressed but also a little bemused that The Mysterious Bookshop should figure so largely in the life of an Indian bibliophile. We spoke very briefly, perhaps a minute or two after that, and he readily signed The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.

When I visited The Mysterious Bookshop next, it was a decade later at its spacious new Tribeca location in lower Manhattan. This time I was carrying with me several titles from The Mysterious Press but he was unavailable. I spent a good part of the day browsing and talking to the staff, asking them for recommendations. One set of publications from The Mysterious Press that I have pursued are their Christmas keepsakes. For the past eighteen years or so, Mr.Penzler has kept a tradition going of issuing little keepsakes from the press and the bookshop as Christmas gifts for customers. He would commission an original crime story from a well loved, bestselling mystery author and produce them in a limited run pamphlet edition of a thousand copies.

There was, however, one plot rule or condition the authors had to include when setting these stories (and a delightful condition it was too, and the reason why I collected them): some of the action in each story has to take place in The Mysterious Bookshop! And just a year or two ago, the best of the keepsakes were collected in one book: Christmas at The Mysterious Bookshop. It’s a marvelous anthology, unique for containing a range of bookish stories featuring a real mystery bookshop and its real proprietor whose bespoke collection of rare and first editions of mystery and detective fiction totals at least 50,000.

One story here revolves around the hunt for a lost Dashiell Hammett manuscript; in another, Lawrence Block’s hero, Chip Harrison has to investigate the disappearance of an unpublished Cornell Woolrich manuscript from Penzler’s private library at his office. It happens during a Christmas Eve party at the bookshop, and all the guests, several of them famous figures in the New York publishing world, become suspects. What is singular and charming about this anthology is that it is the bookshop that is often the femme fatale in these stories!