‘WHAT WE DO HERE IS SO DIFFERENT’
New independent book stores have been opening around Conn.
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 a $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