Next time you’re driving through Covington and pass the Anchor Grill on Pike Street, make sure to take notice of a conspicuously out-of-place building lathered in bright blue paint. Step inside, and you’ll find the sort of literary paradise you’d normally only see in the movies.
Conveyor Belt Books, the preferred bookstore of every in-the-know Cincinnatian, has made a name for itself thanks to its shockingly low prices and a book selection both incredibly broad and tightly curated. A walk up and down the store’s shelves reveals several used and rare finds of every time period and genre, from Harold Robbins paperbacks to post-modern classics to 20th-century African literature to decades-old nonfiction works on avant-garde jazz.
It’s all thanks to Brandon DiSabatino, the New York City transplant who once sold books on street corners in the Big Apple for many years. He had visited Cincinnati before, but returned to the Queen City over a decade ago while one of his plays was being performed at the 2015 Cincinnati Fringe Festival during what he jokingly described as a “charitably interesting economic situation.” Around the same time, he had reached a milestone of living in NYC for ten years.
“Typically, from everyone I knew, you reach that point and you leave or stay forever. The economics of New York were not exactly inviting for staying, and I felt like I needed a change of scenery, a change of venue,” he said. “When I visited Cincinnati, I thought it was a very charming place. I dug the city. Everybody that came down from New York with me was very taken by it, thought the architecture was interesting, and felt like there were real opportunities. You could feel something was happening here.”
Fast forward to six months before the COVID-19 pandemic, and DiSabatino and his partner at the time had made real strides in opening their own storefront. They did a couple of pop-ups at Washington Park’s City Flea, in an effort to ensure their “particular strains and certain emphases” of literature would be well-received by Cincinnatians. Feedback was overwhelmingly positive.
“Whenever there was a City Flea, we’d ask people, ‘Hey, would you be interested in a store like this?'” he said. “And people were very encouraging and excited about it. They seemed to savor the idea of being able to walk up to a table and talk about authors like Julio Cortázar. It was a serious indication to us that this idea could work.”
Conveyor Belt Books officially opened at its current Pike Street location in 2022, and word quickly spread across the city thanks to the unusual selection of works you can’t find anywhere else in the region—especially not for under $10, like books inside the shop tend to be. As mentioned, despite the store’s broad range of everything from poetry to philosophy to science fiction, DiSabatino’s curation is “ruthlessly focused.” He takes particular interest in highlighting authors who have contributed greatly to the literary world but never quite received the flowers they deserved.
“Whether it’s neglected female authors or pioneering gay fiction or just fringe French weirdos, that’s one of our main things. When you talk about neglected communities within the arts, sometimes the conversation can be that these people didn’t have access or were prohibited from making these things. But that’s not the case,” he said. “Everyone has always been making art, but publicity and accessibility for these works was so severely limited. There’s a fine tradition of outsiders silently shaping the course of fiction, and those are the people that the store has a tremendous affinity for.”
Business had mostly been good—the store just celebrated its fourth anniversary—until earlier this year. Thanks to a series of traffic changes, like the destruction of the 4th Street bridge linking Covington and Newport and the eventual closure of the Pike Street turnaround that connects the area to the Brent Spence Bridge, the store’s foot traffic experienced a “sharp decline,” DiSabatino said.
Conveyor Belt’s “mildly inconvenient” location for Cincinnatians had now become “more of an unavoidably inconvenient” expedition. Seeing the writing on the wall thanks to even further travel diversions (like the upcoming seven-year Brent Spence Corridor project, which will kneecap foot traffic to Covington even further during construction), DiSabatino acknowledged it was time to head for greener pastures.
He put feelers out with several business contacts across the city and investigated neighborhoods like Northside thoroughly, but came up short. Then Jeff Wilson of the Clifton Business Association got in touch, and eventually someone offered to let DiSabatino take a look inside the former Proud Rooster building, a now-shuttered decades-old diner that sat directly across from the Esquire Theatre.
“As I got the call back about the Proud Rooster, I happened to be parked across the street from it. It seemed like a crazy idea since it was a diner for 50 years, but I thought, eh, why not take a look at it,” he said. “The second I walked in, I had an immediate response. I began envisioning things … it just seemed like I was granted a kind of sight where I could picture ‘oh yeah, this could actually kind of work.'”
He talked to several current and former Clifton business owners, including Torn Light Records owner Alex York, who successfully moved his business from Northern Kentucky to Clifton (and, later, Chicago). The perfect location combined with all the conversations made DiSabatino “feel as if I would be foolish to pass up an opportunity like this.” So, on May 27, he signed the lease and announced the store’s big move in a heartfelt social media post, thanking their many loyal customers in Covington.
At the moment, DiSabatino is shooting for an October opening, and has been told by the building’s landlord that he might be able to get in even earlier—although, given his experience working construction in NYC, he’s well aware that there are many “peccadilloes and idiosyncrasies” that could come with converting an old diner to a quiet book shop. Regardless, he’s incredibly enthused about the move.
“I would do a somersault down Ludlow Avenue right now if I weren’t under psychological stress just trying to organize everything,” he said. “Once it’s done, I’ll probably be doing a cartwheel down the street. I can’t promise that it’s going to be the most artfully executed cartwheel, but I can assure you it will be an ecstatic one, and one in which even if some muscles are destroyed, it will have been done in good enthusiasm.”
In the meantime, the Pike Street location will still stay open. He’s hoping people still continue to make the journey, as the big move to the city costs quite a bit and DiSabatino needs all the help he can get. But mostly, he just wants people to read as much as possible without feeling unwelcome to do so.
“I think when you sell certain types of literature, people can maybe view it in an exclusive manner. You don’t want to feel like you’re not in the club, you know? It’s something I stress to people cause, y’know, I have no degree, no MFA, any of that. I’m white trash with a library card,” he said. “I feel like everything is accessible to everyone and should be accessible to everyone … Reading is kind of the last solitary activity, but it’s also an exploratory activity where you can feel empathy, you can feel a shock of recognition, you can have an epiphanic realization, or simply your heart being open.”
Once moved in, Conveyor Belt plans to expand its community outreach. DiSabatino points to the store’s current live music performances, the in-store “Domestic Water” reading series led by Harris Wheeler, and their ongoing series of film screenings at the Esquire Theatre—now the store’s next-door-neighbor—as examples of what the store’s future will look like.
“I think it was Camus who said an artist’s work was nothing but a slow trek to rediscover those two or three great and simple images where our heart first opened, and I think art provides that opportunity … I want people to have that opportunity with us,” he said. “We want to make Cincinnati a cooler place, and we want other people to be involved in it, too. I want people to be like, ‘all right, there’s something going on here. I like what these people are doing.'”
