37 Greenpoint Avenue, n+1

Publishers Noted: in which our publisher reviews the building of another publisher

Mark Krotov, the publisher and coeditor of the literary magazine n+1, holds strong opinions about light bulbs. He claims the city’s conversion of more than 250,000 streetlights from sodium-vapor lamps to light-emitting diodes (LEDs) over the past decade, along with the recent federal ban on the sale of most incandescent bulbs, constitutes “the single greatest visual transition in New York history.” Such convictions have not yet won over his colleagues. “I wanted to write a whole piece about the LEDization of the world, and my comrades said, ‘Shut the fuck up.’”

I was talking with Krotov and his colleagues­—sorry, comrades—­about their office in the minutes before the launch party for their forty-seventh issue, “Passage.” Founded in 2004, n+1 lives in a loft on the third floor of an unassuming, five-story, red brick building from 1931. I entered through the loading dock into a narrow, gypsum-clad, double-loaded corridor that suggested a conversion from an earlier, more industrial life. …