A Vactioner's Guide to Rural New England Bookstores will arrive in its 2nd edition soon

When my book was first published in 2008, it was a lot of fun anticipating how readers would accept it. The limited run was a great learning experience, which I am grateful for, as I believe it greatly contributed to the quality of the newest edition due out this summer.



The first edition was published in 2008.

As soon as it is ready to print, I will mention it here and anyone interested in getting a copy can email me or buy it online. The new edition has lots of new features. The best new feature is the One-Day-Bookstore-Tour, which has a half dozen of my favorite routes for spending the day in a bookstore.

Another new feature is the focus on Used and Rare bookshops. Previously, many used bookshops were included, but they were not highlighted as they are in the new edition.

The question I raised back in 2008 was whether the New England rural bookstore could survive. I suggested that there were some rare qualities about our region that would permit the independent bookshop owner to succeed, where some other parts of the country might have more difficulty. In many ways I think the rural New England bookshop is doing well. In fact, I have seen more than one new shop open, including one close to my home in Jefferson, where I had the good luck to be its first customer in the summer of 2011. The Beech Tree Place bookshop is celebrating its first-year anniversary in a few weeks and that's a testament to its owner, but in some ways to the support of the New England book-buying public.

When you like to read as much as I do, it's probably not feasible to buy a full price New York Times bestseller each week. That's just too expensive. Besides, not enough books are being written currently that hold my interest. I prefer books about historical figures, written by people who were there. That's why I enjoyed finding a copy of Theodore White's book, In Search of History, because he knew the characters he wrote about - and those characters shaped the world I grew up in during the 1950's and 1960's. That's much more exciting to me than most of today's literature.

If you want more book for your buck, my book will help you find a bargain and probably something much more worth reading. I hope so, anyway.