My Not So Easy Choices for Best Used Bookstores

The editor of Yankee Magazine asked me to select my five favorite used bookstores for their Best 5 in New England feature. It seemed easy, as I have lots of favorite used bookstores, so surely I can pick the best five?


Best 5 Used Bookstores

Oops! Imagine trying to pick your “best” grandchild? What seemed easy became a bit of a chore when I had to get down to selecting five used bookshops. Mel Allen, the editor of Yankee Magazine, gave me some grace to select an additional 10 runners-up, which helped a little. My selections appear in the January-February issue of Yankee Magazine, and the runners-up appear in the online version.



The shops I selected were:



- The Montague Bookmill – Montague MA

- Shire Book Shop – Franklin MA

- Pleasant Street Books – Woodstock VT

- Drake Farm Books – Northampton NH

- The Book Barn – Niantic CT

I feel very comfortable with these choices and the 10 honorable mentions too. They are certainly worthy candidates for someone looking for a great used bookshop in New England. It’s just that there are many others equally worthy of being a Top 5 choice. In my book, A Vacationer’s Guide to Rural New England Bookstores, I write about 31 used books shops that are among my favorites.



January-February 2013 issue

Here are the 10 runners-up from Yankee Magazine:


- Big Chicken Barn – Ellsworth ME

- Carlson Turner Books – Portland ME

- Bar Harbor Book Shop – Hulls Cove ME

- Henniker Book Farm – Henniker NH

- Whitlock Farm Booksellers – Bethany CT

- The Traveler Book Cellar – Union CT

- Vintage Books – Hopkinton MA

- Book Bear – West Brookfield MA

- Myopic Books (Paper Nautilus Books) – Providence RI

- The Book Shed – Benson VT

You can link to Amazon to buy my Guide.

The Latest Edition of Guide Book Has Arrived

Latest edition of Guide Book

The latest edition of my Guide Book, A Vacationer’s Guide to Rural New England Bookstores, was published last week and is available now for purchase. The new edition is divided into three sections; Full-Service Independent Bookstores, Used-Rare Book Shops, and One-Day Bookstore-Tour itineraries. It’s a useful Guide for someone visiting New England on vacation with an eye toward finding a good bookstore nearby their destination.

Destination Bookstores
In my view, each of these bookshops is a destination itself and that’s why it’s in the Guide. The things I look for in a bookshop go beyond just the books; they include things like how helpful and knowledgeable are the staff and the depth and interest of the collection. Does the shop provide Author signings? Does it have other products and services such as a café, a book-club meeting room, and a children’s section?


The 39 bookstores highlighted in the Guide are my favorites, but I recognize that others will have a different collection of favorite shops. That’s okay. In fact, that’s what makes assembling the Guide so much fun for me. I have added and subtracted to the Guide over the years as things change. My concern has been that the change would be for the worse – but, it appears it has been for the better. In more than one case a Local, Independent shop has taken over the location of a previous Big Box store. Not that I’m gleeful about that (but, I am).


Another aspect of the Guide is that even folks who live in a nearby town to one of these shops can reconsider whether it’s a better idea to visit a Local, Independent or Used Book Shop, rather than a Big Box shop. Buy Local is more than a slogan to me. I think we benefit everyone when we help keep the local shopkeeper going. He or she is more inclined to be a good neighbor in my opinion; making choices about suppliers, and community participation that benefits the local economy.

The Books of November

I generally write about the bookstores where I buy my books. Today, I am writing about the books I read this month. There were five of them:

-          How America Saved the World by Eric Hammel (Tatnuck Bookseller)
-          The Freemasons by Jasper Ridley (Tatnuck Bookseller)
-          David Crockett by Michael Wallis (The Alamo Bookstore)
-          Unstuck in Time by Gregory D. Sumner (Books and Beans)
-          Salinger by Paul Alexander (Annie’s Book Stop)

These five books boil down to three biographies and two history books. That’s pretty much the way I roll on a month-in month-out basis. If I read five books, three or four of them are biography or autobiography. And even one of the history books was primarily focused on the decisions of Franklin Roosevelt and the key military leaders in the United States during the pre-war years. In essence, it was a biography. Here then is where I bought the books and what they were about.

Tatnuck Bookseller - Westborough

That said; How America Saved the World by Eric Hammel posed a contradictory interpretation of just how prepared the United States was prior to the start of the Second World War. Common thinking holds that the U.S. pulled together after the attack at Pearl Harbor and miraculously put two million soldiers and all the armaments they needed together in less than two years. The book argues that Roosevelt and his planners held a meeting as early as 1938 that launched the country into a true arsenal of democracy mode. The detailed and comprehensive writing was very convincing.

The Freemasons by Jasper Ridley provided a history of the secret organization that sorted the myths from the truth. It was interesting to read that at every major moment in history, where someone has accused the Freemasons of ulterior or suspect motives, there turned out to be just as many Freemasons on each side of the controversy. In the Revolutionary War, where masons such as Washington and Benjamin Franklin were leading the rebels, the British were being led by men who also were masons. Once you understand the real behavior of these and other leaders in history, the Freemasons are not so hard to understand.

Books and Beans - Southbridge

At the Books and Beans shop in Southbridge I found Unstuck in Time by Gregory D. Sumner, which is a clever “biography” of the fourteen novels written by Kurt Vonnegut. As the author unravels each novel, it becomes clearer how Vonnegut evolved as a writer and as an observer of the human condition. Vonnegut was focused on the American Dream, which also evolved over the years. The theme of being unstuck in time moves through each novel developing its own inertia with each novel building on the one that went before.

Annie’s Book Stop – W.Boylston

The elusive writer, J.D. Salinger is the subject of Paul Alexander’s book, Salinger. For those who have read The Catcher in the Rye, it is fascinating to learn about the recluse writer and the events in his life which may contribute to our understanding of where his story ideas came from. It is well known as a writer’s axiom that one should write about what one knows. So, a backwoodsman might write a tale about a bear hunting excursion and a dancer might write about a round the world cruise assignment for an entertainment troupe. That all makes sense. But, how does one write about a young boy named Holden Caulfield and create a literary triumph? The biography is fascinating and illuminating. But, not all questions are eventually answered.

The Alamo Bookstore – San Antonio

While on a reunion with friends I served with in the Air Force, we visited the Alamo in San Antonio and I found a great book, David Crockett by Michael Wallis. I didn’t find the book in a rural New England bookstore, but it was one of the books I read in November; so, I am reporting on it. David Crockett was a man who became a legend in his own time. His contemporaries made him a legend for the things he did throughout his life. Today, he is sometimes reduced to a man who fought and died at the Alamo. But, in essence, that was one of the least consequential actions of his life. The real story of Crockett is more fascinating than the TV series or the portrayals in Hollywood films.