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.