The particular pleasure of used bookstores

An ode

A couple of weekends ago, our friend Mark was visiting, and we planned to take a seaside hike out in Groton, Connecticut. “Then we can stop at the Book Barn,” my husband suggested.

I was sure we must have taken Mark—one of our book lovingest friends—there before, but he looked puzzled.

Both of us were incredulous: “We’ve never taken you to the Book Barn??”

If you’re a book lover like we are, you probably understand what I mean when I say that used bookstores have a special appeal. They tend toward hodgepodge. You might have to be willing to roll up your sleeves and pluck through their selection. You might even get lost—figuratively, in a book, but also literally, among rambling shelves. But the Book Barn is a used bookstore on steroids. I’ve never seen anything else like it. Their tag line is “a bibliophile’s bliss.” We probably should have warned Mark because that “bliss” can be downright overwhelming if you don’t know what’s coming.

The Book Barn is, yes, a barn on the main route into the village of Niantic on Long Island Sound in eastern Connecticut. Its low-ceilinged basement houses the history section, but the Book Barn takes its categories seriously, and you will find yourself rambling not just through “history,” but past sections for every imaginable geographical region and time period, plus special categories like The British Monarchy and U.S. Presidents. Now imagine this extended to every category. The barn’s main level is home to architecture, art, photography, local authors and all their attendant subtopics plus more, and a second floor stocks medicine, holistic health, LGBTQ+, self-help, YA, etc., etc. The floors creak, the shelves create nooks, and, like any self-respecting used bookstore, it comes complete with resident cats.

But what makes the Book Barn special—and before I go any farther, I should probably mention that they have no idea I’m writing this piece—is the fact that it sprawls into multiple little outbuildings and kiosks, where you’ll find math and the sciences, gardening and farming, hiking, poetry, astronomy, furniture, law, geneology, fantasy, horror, and lots of general fiction, to name just a few more categories. Some of these outbuildings have amusing names, like Hades, where “you will find assorted books of every size, shape, and category.  Everything just $1.00.  It's not organized in any fashion...book Hades indeed,” the website notes. 

You can also ramble along garden paths to read on a secluded bench or feed the goats or play a game of tabletop chess or cut through the trees to the satellite store on the lot next door. To get to the Book Barn’s third store, you’ll have to take a short drive downtown.

We’ve been to the Book Barn in all sorts of weather. The kiosks are open even in winter, and customers abound. Where all these book lovers come from I can’t say. It’s both astonishing and encouraging.

One of the things that’s a bit overwhelming about the Book Barn, and the thing that we should have inoculated Mark against, is that the New Arrivals kiosks—the first ones you come to—are completely unorganized. They’re filled with the books that have just come in (there’s an entire book-trading mechanism in operation at the same time as people are making their purchases), and none of them have been properly sorted. But heaven forbid you should have to wait until they are! Instead, you’re invited to dig right in, if you dare and can take a Zenlike approach to accepting whatever comes to you.

As is true at most used bookstores, you can’t be looking for something particular. That is simply folly—although one of my favorite used bookstore moments happened when I told the owner of Grey Matter Books in Hadley, Massachusetts that I was looking for an obscure biography of Sylvia Beach. I couldn’t quite recall the title or the author, but he said, “Hang on, I think we have that” and walked over to one of the jam-packed bookcases in his rabbit warren of a shop and pulled it right off the shelf. He appeared to be a walking, breathing inventory of tens of thousands of books.

I don’t love everything about used bookstores. Secondhand books can be a little bit grimy with that eau de must scent. You can’t help but wonder where some of them have been. At one Book Barn kiosk, I passed on a book by John Crowley, whose work I’ve been meaning to read for awhile, because something resembling a dead bug was decisively squished on its cover. I’ll come across a Crowley again.

But give me a couple of hours in Niantic—or the New Haven branch of Grey Matter, or my local shop-with-coffee Books & Company (where my own store credit for book trade-ins lives), or the tipsy-floored ramshackle barn of books known as Whitlock’s—and I’ll enter that fugue state in which all that exists in my consciousness is books and the entirely imagined time to read every one that interests me. Usually, I snap out of it and take home just a modest three or four.

Used bookstores are partly about the expression of a love of reading unencumbered by the barrier of cost. They’re also about the thrill of the hunt. “You used to be able to have that experience in every town in America,” Grey Matter owner Sam Burton said when I interviewed him at his New Haven store back in 2019. “There was a sport to it. You never knew what you would find.” 

In some places, you can find that sport still—and when you do, ah, what a satisfying way to while away a lazy afternoon.