In the old days—the days of the sidewalk shoeshine, the days of the pay phone—a New Yorker could buy an evening edition of the Times or the Post from a metal news box and read it on the subway home. No push notifications involved. But history has a way of repeating itself. Somehow, baggy jeans are back, and mullets, too. And news boxes are showing up on street corners again. A few years ago, Mitch Anzuoni, a self-proclaimed multimedia mogul who runs a small press called Inpatient, started placing old newspaper boxes around town. Inside: posters, books, zines, erotica. Cost: a quarter. “I publish anything!” Anzuoni said the other day, on the sidewalk near his office, in Boerum Hill. “Newspapers, underground newspapers, stuff I find on the Internet.” He read from one of the offerings, “a book of mind-control patents that are really crazy!”: “This invention pertains to influencing the nervous system of a subject by a weak externally applied magnetic field with a frequency near 1/2 hz.”

Anzuoni, who wore dirty white sneakers and carried a waterproof backpack (“I work in books, man! Water is the enemy!”), was loading a recently acquired news box into the back of his girlfriend’s Lexus S.U.V. “This is the Inpatient Express,” he said, of the car. He pointed to the news box, which he had bought on eBay, for two hundred and fifty dollars. “Here is the new guy, a beautiful Facebook blue. I drove out to New Jersey to get it.”

Coco Fitterman, a twenty-four-year-old master’s student in comparative literature at cuny, who works as Anzuoni’s “executive-intern-in-chief,” was helping out. “It’s so heavy!” she said, hoisting the box into the trunk, which also held L. L. Bean snowshoes. “I don’t know how I thought we were going to take this on the train!”

Anzuoni, who is thirty-two, planned to spend the afternoon checking on his news boxes before installing the latest one. Inpatient’s titles, which are printed and bound in Reykjavík, Iceland, include a novel, translated from the Russian, that is rumored to be authored by Vladimir Putin’s former deputy chief of staff; a story about the sex life of a grocery-store cashier; and a young woman’s (that is, Fitterman’s) first chapbook. “I realized I can make any book I want,” Anzuoni said. “Our motto is ‘We Publish What Others Don’t.’ ” His stock is sold at bookstores in Paris, Mexico City, Hong Kong, Berlin, Brussels. In New York, McNally Jackson, Printed Matter, and, occasionally, the store at the Whitney Museum carry Inpatient titles, but Anzuoni prefers less conventional distribution. He used to sell books out of special pockets sewn inside a trenchcoat: “I’d just go up to people who looked bored. ‘Hey, want to buy a book?’ ”

The news-box project had a tumultuous beginning. In 2019, Anzuoni dropped off his first box, painted taxicab yellow, outside the Whitney, with the blessing of the city’s Department of Transportation. A week later, he walked by and saw that it was gone. He asked a museum security guard if he knew what had happened. The guy didn’t, but he promised to review security-camera footage of the scene. The next day, the Whitney’s head of security called with news that an employee had accidentally moved the news box to the loading dock. “It turns out we treated it as lost property,” the guard said. “It got picked up and taken to a junk yard in Red Hook and destroyed.”

Anzuoni was devastated. He demanded an apology. The Whitney sent him one, on official letterhead, and a check for $477.56—what he had paid for the news box. (A friend interning at the museum later told Anzuoni that the incident is mentioned in a PowerPoint presentation given during an orientation for new employees.)

A few boxes later, Anzuoni double-parked the Lexus outside Clementine Bakery, in Clinton Hill, and jumped out to check the revenue from a dark-green news box. Twenty-two dollars and seventy-five cents in quarters. “Do you want to keep a stack for your laundry?” Anzuoni asked Fitterman, who pocketed a few. A young man who had been standing in line at Clementine for a cold brew and a cauliflower sandwich hesitantly approached the box. “I don’t have any quarters,” he said. Anzuoni was happy to make change.

As the guy dropped a quarter in the slot, Anzuoni whispered, “It makes such a good sound!” The customer walked away with an art book about cults and paramilitary organizations (retail: twenty-five dollars) and a Spencer Longo collage print (limited edition: priceless). “Very cool,” he said.

Across town, in front of an art gallery in Chinatown, Anzuoni and Fitterman dropped off the new box, which he had nicknamed Old Blue. “All right, little buddy. Godspeed. You better be empty next time I’m here!” Anzuoni said. Fitterman headed to class, and Anzuoni mulled his next distribution project: “I really want to get a fridge—one of those fridges that you can see into, that you can get a drink out of—and I want to stock books in them and sell ice-cold books to people. Like, you ever hold a cold book in your hand? It feels amazing!” ♦