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“I don’t actually go to newsstands anymore,” said Tina Brown, the editor in chief of Newsweek/The Daily Beast, a few days after she announced last week that Newsweek would become an all-digital publication and terminate its 79-year run in print by the end of 2012. But while Brown insists that she prefers reading on her Kindle when traveling and she sees “everybody reading screens,” there are still places in the world that thrive on stacks upon stacks of printed matter. One such is the corner of Eighth Avenue and 12th Street in Manhattan.

“I am sad,” said Mohammed Ahmed, the manager and part-owner of Casa Magazines, when I asked him how he felt about Newsweek’s imminent departure from his shelves. “Everything is going digital.” But Ahmed, who is 55 and originally from Hyderabad, India, doesn’t seem to be the brooding type. Moments later, he was handing me the newer magazines ( Frankie, OnEarth, Self Service and CR Fashion Book among them) that have now found their place in his store.

Casa Magazines stocks around 2,000 titles — from fashion glossies to newspapers to hobby magazines to porn. Some titles, like the Indonesian fashion magazine DA MAN and the men’s lifestyle publication Made in Brazil are only available in New York through Ahmed. “It’s the magazine Mecca,” said James Reginato, who was browsing in Ahmed’s store Tuesday, and who happens to write for Vanity Fair. Reginato called Ahmed “the king of the Village.”

Ahmed told me that this customers determine what he stocks. His West Village location, he says, explains the wealth of fashion magazines. The most popular ones are Fantastic Man, The Gentlewoman, Vogue Hommes International and Paris Vogue. Gripping her newly purchased Vogue and The World Of Interiors, Janet Russo, once the eponymous owner of a clothing store in NoLIta but who now lives in Newport, R.I., told me she comes to Casa Magazines to stock up every time she comes back to New York.

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Regulars seem to make up a big portion of the store’s clientele. Ahmed, as a good bartender does, remembers his customers’ names and gives out high-fives and tailored recommendations. Rachel Levinsohn, a frequent customer who is originally from Jerusalem and has been living in New York for 50 years, visits Casa Magazines every day to buy The New York Times and, occasionally, Yediot Ahronot, a Hebrew-language paper. Instead of getting her periodicals delivered at home, she told me, she’s “better off supporting local shopkeepers, keeping the neighborhood alive.”

Ahmed has run the store since 1995. He admitted that he was scared about the changes in the print-magazine industry. It was four or five years ago, he said, that business started to decline. That shift has been particularly evident for pornographic magazines. Porn used to account for about 35 percent of Ahmed’s supply; now it’s 10 percent. Ahmed reasons that porn, compared to fashion, is something people generally prefer to consume over the Internet.

To my surprise (and mild disappointment), Ahmed told me that the most desired elusive publications he gets requests for are not from some outlandish or salacious subculture in magazine form — often they are medical journals, many of which do not sell to newsstands. When I asked if he would stock even the most peculiar pornographic magazine if it were likely to have but one buyer, he said yes. He will provide any publication that will sell to a newsstand, he said. “Even if only one person wants it, I can put it on the shelf, and people will see it and buy it.”

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As she was leaving, Levinsohn, the New York Times-buying regular, asked me where she would be able to find my story. Online, I said. “Oh . . .” she said, and looked away.