No Porn, Just Books and Zines Robert Wright for The New York Times From left: Eddie Goldblatt, Lele Saveri and Jamie Falkowski man the Newsstand at the Metropolitan Avenue stop in Brooklyn. The rumble of trains and the beeps of swiping fare cards don't seem to distract shoppers huddled inside a tiny newsstand at the Metropolitan Avenue subway station in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Some customers squat, flipping through literary magazines and novels with titles like "Killing Williamsburg." Others thumb through booklets of photocopied Polaroids. There isn't a daily paper or a gossip magazine in sight, and almost no one looks up when a curious commuter asks, "What is this place?" This place is the Newsstand, a pop-up shop that has transformed an ordinary subway space into a store for independently published magazines, books, comics and zines. In a digitalized world, it is a small haven for printed media. Underground, without cellphone service, people are moved to engage, said Lele Saveri, the Newsstand's manager. "I never get someone on a phone and reading," he said. They are focused on whatever is in their hands. The Newsstand, open until July 20, carries selections from some of the city's best-known specialty bookshops: magazines and journals from McNally-Jackson in SoHo; zines and photography books from Dashwood Books on the Lower East Side of Manhattan; comics from the Desert Island bookstore in Williamsburg; art books from Ohwow in Greenwich Village. The stores selected the offerings, a kind of "staff picks" for the tight space. "I was trying to find a way of supporting that scene without stepping on their toes," Mr. Saveri said of the stores he asked to participate. The stand has also fielded donations and submissions from local artists and recruited them as guest clerks. Peter Sutherland, an artist and photographer, will work the counter on Wednesday. Mr. Saveri said he gets batches of zines from new artists daily and has even had commuters drop off bags of novels that they've finished reading. You won't find Snickers bars or diet soda here, although the Newsstand does stock snacks. There are little cans of Perrier, bottles of fermented tea and Brooklyn-made treats like Ovenly bacon-fat-roasted peanuts and McClure's potato chips. Kevin Kearney, a partner and managing director at Alldayeveryday, a marketing and communications agency, approached Mr. Saveri, a photographer, curator and organizer of the city's 8-Ball Zine fair, about creating an alternative newsstand in January. Mr. Kearney said the idea arose from a comment that a partner at Alldayeveryday made as they passed the empty newsstand at the Metropolitan Avenue station: in another life, he said, he would have liked to run a newsstand. Mr. Kearney contacted the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and though it usually leases spaces by the year, it was open to a short-term tenant for the newsstand, which had been empty since last August. "They had an interesting and innovative proposal for how to have an amenity in there for our customers and generate a little revenue for us," said Adam Lisberg, an authority spokesman. The Newsstand, which opened June 15, rents the space and splits profits with the bookstores. John Felix Peña, 27, said he got off the train a stop early to check out the stand. "You definitely see a lot of art within the subways," he said. But not anything that you can take home with you. For his part, Mr. Kearney said it was satisfying to connect people with books and art. But it's also important, he said, "to provide for the woman who came in with her daughter, just looking for more gum." The Newsstand is open through July 20 at the Metropolitan Avenue subway station on the L and G lines in Williamsburg, Brooklyn; Monday to Friday, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, noon to 7 p.m.