For those wishing to catch a glimpse of the Ghost of Christmas Past in the Charles Dickens classic “A Christmas Carol”, there are no shortage of options this holiday season, from Greenwich through the Hartford Stage to The Granite Theatre just over the Stonington line in Westerly, R.I.
Looking to gift the book instead for someone on your list, whether hot off the presses or a vintage edition? New shops have continued to pop up this year across Connecticut, with proprietors believing the “indie” book ethic is alive and well — and with a viable future alongside Amazon and big-box stores like Barnes & Noble.
In the past year, new independent book shops have opened in Old Greenwich, New Haven, West Hartford and Mystic, with another to arrive next month in Danbury: The BookSmiths Shoppe, born of Michelle Smith’s deep dive into reading in the earliest stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.
As her little mountain of titles grew, Smith mulled donating them or trying to sell them on eBay. Opting for the latter, her first book sold almost immediately, then the next, and then the next. She decided to set up a full-fledged eBay storefront, and when monthly sales hit $2,000 — shipments accompanied by a personal note and a bag of tea from Fairfield-based Bigelow Tea — Smith began hunting for a storefront.
New, used, rare — and $25,000 rarity
Smith made an out-of-the-box choice in The Summit, built as the sprawling headquarters of Union Carbide that is now being redeveloped for a mix of apartments, offices, retail and services in Danbury. While The Summit will have several hundred units of apartments, Toll Brothers and other developers have built exponentially more town houses and apartments in the adjoining Reserve lands on Connecticut’s western border.
“I felt a small, independent bookstore would fare well here,” Smith said of her decision to take space in The Summit versus a downtown location like Books on the Common in Ridgefield where she lives. “If they are looking for a specific title, I go out of my way to help them. It’s just something that I love to do, a passion.”
Smith said she had hoped to be able to open The BookSmiths Shoppe before Christmas, but the space she is leasing has yet to be fitted out. She is now eyeing a mid-January opening, with an inventory of about 25,000 volumes she purchases through Ingram Content Group — mostly new but with a small percentage of used books.
At the other side of Connecticut, Colleen Lynch similarly started her No Other Book Like This shop as an online storefront — in her case on Etsy — before stumbling onto the opportunity for a retail store focused on used and rare books.
Growing up in Newtown and spending summers in Groton at the family’s vacation home, Lynch graduated from the University of Connecticut in 2009 and went on to get a master’s degree in library and information science from Simmons University in Boston.
Lynch landed a succession of librarian gigs including the Mystic & Noank Library, Quinnipiac University and the New Haven Free Public Library where she also helped entrepreneurs figure out how to set up small businesses.
With the libraries where she worked getting more donations of used books than they could shelve or sell, the institutions were more than happy to let Lynch take some of the volumes off their hands. Lynch eventually cobbled together an extensive collection that outgrew her apartment at the time. By 2015, Lynch decided to open No Other Book Like This as an online storefront on Etsy.
“I would cull my collection for what was beautiful and old but I knew I wouldn’t read,'” Lynch said. “I started the Etsy shop and I made $1,000 that first month. … But I never thought the bookstore was going to become a real bookstore.”
Last year while browsing the aisles of Books Etc in Groton, Lynch learned the owner was looking to find a buyer who would continue it as a bookstore, and worked out an arrangement to take over the business and its 30,000-plus volumes.
Lynch decided to move the shop this year to a larger location in Stonington, after her father spotted an available storefront on Roosevelt Avenue across from the Mystic stop of Amtrak that had not been listed on commercial real estate websites, in a small plaza that includes the “zero-waste” Ditty Bag Market & Cafe.
If “reuse” is the first mantra of environmental sustainability, No Other Book Like This passes another litmus test — not only does it resell orphaned volumes, but the shelving fixtures Lynch inherited from Books Etc date back to a Borders Books store that had closed a decade back in Waterford.
Lynch said large numbers of Books Etc customers have found their way to the new store in Mystic, with many living in the village themselves. But No Other Book Like This now is cultivating a far-flung clientele beyond the Etsy front, given the large number of tourists who carve out a little downtown shopping on their itinerary hitting the Mystic Seaport Museum and Mystic Aquarium. Books on local history and lore have done particularly well since setting up shop in Mystic, Lynch said.
Lynch sells rare titles both in the shop and online, including one priced at $25,000 — a signed edition of the 1904 children’s book “King Arthur’s Wood” by Elizabeth Stanhope Forbes, which is one of only about 350 original volumes that were printed.
‘Surprise and delight’
In the past year, other new bookstores have opened in Connecticut include Athena Books in Old Greenwich and Possible Futures in New Haven, while Mystic’s Bank Square Books has elected to keep open its Title IX: A Bookstore in downtown New London that originally debuted as a pop-up shop.
And in West Hartford, the owner of the Glastonbury shop River Bend Bookshop Meghan Haydn chose “Small Business Saturday” last week to open a second location at 161 Park Road, after a good showing for her own pop-up shop at the nearby Playhouse on Park theater during a 2019 stage run of “Pride and Prejudice” (“A Charles Dickens Christmas” is the current production).
Like The BookSmiths Shoppe and No Other Book Like This, River Bend Bookshop had its own run as an online-only store — but out of necessity during the COVID-19 pandemic, with the original Glastonbury shop being converted into a fulfillment warehouse of sorts to handle online orders. During the shutdown, Haydn also created a bookmobile to appear at varying events, with about 1,000 titles available for purchase.
The new store in West Hartford was bustling with activity on Thursday afternoon, as shoppers stopped by to check out River Bend Books. West Hartford has a Barnes & Noble store at the Blue Back Square shopping district, but Haydn said many people want a different browsing experience from the big-box variety.
“What we do here is so different,” Haydn said. “We have a surprise-and-delight element.”
[email protected]; @casoulman
