The Village Bookstore
By Paul De Angelis

What makes a good bookstore? If any region of the country is in a position to know, it's ours. An unusual combination of location, cultural evolution, the economics of real estate, and chance, have brought back for our area a kind of golden age of the old-time, customer-driven bookstore. This at a time when the world center of the book publishing business, New York City, has become downright inhospitable to the independent bookseller, whether of new or used books.

Ask a native New Yorker about the legendary bookstores of old--The Gotham, The Eighth St. Bookstore, the upper West Side's Shakespeare & Co--and with few exceptions they've all bitten the dust. The gargantua of used bookstores, the Strand, still stands, but the glory that was once the Fourth Avenue used book district disappeared more than a generation ago with the gentrification of Soho and Noho. There still exists a very lively book culture in the city, fed by the legion of publishers, editors, writers, intellectual and artistic promoters, but most of these professionals have their own inside sources.

So where do other New York book lovers go to buy their books? Sure, they can find nearly any title they already know they need at one of the mega-chain superstores that dot the affluent shopping districts of the Big Apple. But browsing? . . . holding in your hands the musty pages of an old picture book that brings back a flood of childhood fantasies, exploring the topography of an interesting bookstore the way you would an intriguing landscape studded with hills, ponds and forests? Seasoned book browsers are the geographers of the bookstore. For them, attempting to navigate the labyrinthine caverns of a Barnes & Noble or Borders' is about as fulfilling an experience as surfing the informational wilds of today's Internet.

So perhaps it is not so surprising to learn from my brief survey of local booksellers that an overwhelming proportion of their customers are New York City residents, some of them come to northern Dutchess specifically to find books! Here, a half dozen independent stores have created a haven for the literate amateur who once stalked the streets of the Big Apple. Merritt and Oblong Books, with two stores apiece respectively in Millbrook and Red Hook and Millerton and Rhinebeck, and Village Books of Tivoli and Main Street Books of Germantown have proved once again not only that "small is beautiful"--but also sustainable. So, how did all this come about?

Merritt Books
Scott Meyer, owner of Merritt Books in Millbrook and Red Hook, grew up in Millbrook and worked for a dozen years as a teacher in Massachusetts before returning to his hometown in the mid 1980s to set up shop on a couple of tables outside the local school. A connection to a Cold Spring remainder house brought him a shipment of a thousand books and thirty days' credit, and he's pursued the hand-to-mouth existence of an independent bookseller ever since, moving from a corner of his hometown department store to larger if unadorned accommodations in a former lumber company building--a renovated version of which still houses the Millbrook store. In 1999 he finally gave in to the entreaties of the Red Hook community and opened the corner store that now sits proudly at the village's busiest intersection.

Meyer seems to run his life and his bookstore on the dual principles of customers and community. He knows both the tastes and faces of his clientele. "Since we don't have a large customer base, we need to offer our few customers a large range of titles. And we have to be able to get anything they want." Despite fairly distinct population profiles, most categories of books sell similarly in both Millbrook and Red Hook, though horse books sell better in the first, and literary criticism better in the Bard College area. Meyer points with pride to his success at having in stock the unexpected book, and to his experience with young adult titles. Merritt not only orders books with specific customers in mind, but in the Red Hook store they leave notes for them in the street-facing window. Not for nothing do they call themselves "bibliotherapists."

Because of his background as a teacher and his bases in Millbrook and Red Hook, Meyer has built up an impressive network of learning and research institutions and the educators that populate them. Meyer is fulsome in his praise of professor authors from Bard and Vassar, and in the early years was able to maintain a business partly on the word-of-mouth spread by research scientists who passed through Millbrook's Institute for Ecological Studies and the smaller Rockefeller University center there. The Millbrook School and the Arlington School District have also been good to him. With this kind of community to support him, Scott finds it perfectly sensible to pay back the community by organizing over a hundred youths in service for the Millbrook Rotary Club (efforts for which he recently received an award). As he says, "If it weren't for the community . . . if my friends and family hadn't started out buying that first book they didn't need, then I might as well have closed right away. . . . Today they can buy books they do need."

Oblong Books
Dick Hermans can lay claim to the longevity award for independent booksellers in this or any area. He started Oblong Books and Music in Millerton in 1975 with a business partner, and by now the store in Millerton has become a regional landmark, well known for carrying in stock the kind of quirky in-print titles that many book buyers associate more with used bookstores. In opening a second store in jazzily modernized quarters in the old Ford dealership in Rhinebeck, Hermans fulfilled a dream going back nearly twenty years.

Hermans grew up in Pine Plains, but knew Millerton equally well, since his dad had run his insurance business from there. Like Meyer, Hermans started out with no money and a big dose of altruism. He and his partner knew the best thing for Millerton would be a good bookstore. Hermans had experience working in a record store in college, and on the sound business principle that it was less likely that both books and records would "go south" at the same moment he decided to add music to the permanent mix. It proved a smart move, not least because of Hermans's personal connections to progressive American folk and folk rock: he is the husband of folksinger Priscilla Herdman, and he himself is DJ of "Harmony Junction," a three-hour radio show that can be heard Thursdays on WKZE featuring mostly acoustic music.

Hermans seems both to identify with and exemplify the boomer 60s generation that is still searching for new experience. Travel and fiction are two of Oblong's strongest sections, he notes, though all categories have depth. He loves "responding to what people are buying and discovering a good book along with them. . . . like Alice Sebold's novel The Lovely Bones," for example, which has been an Oblong bestseller this summer and promises to go on selling through the fall. " I like being in the milieu of books," Dick says, and seems to have a particularly good sense of "the forty to sixty-year-old people who grew up when music really came alive" and are still music and book buyers. He sees them buying both new and established authors and recording artists, and having the means to do it, though he wonders slightly "what it means for fifteen years from now."

Village Books
When Bernard Tieger was a kid growing up in the Bronx, "people from the outlying boroughs" in search of an exotic experience would go to "two kinds of shops" in Greenwich village--bookstores with tables and chess, and coffee shops. "So by the time I was 19 or 20 it was already a lovely fantasy--wouldn't it be nice to have a shop like in Greenwich Village, with tables and chess and music?"

Shortly after Tieger retired from Bard College as a professor of sociology, he had the opportunity to turn his dream to reality. His adopted village of Tivoli was renovating the old Watts DePeyster firehouse to use for a town hall and needed to sell the old frame structure that for decades had housed the village offices and library. What better use for the old library than as site for a used bookstore? Tieger told himself that even if there wasn't going to be much local call for a bookstore immediately, at least there would be a structure to fill up with books and, "if you build it, they will come."

Come they did. Village Books of Tivoli now has a stock of over 30,000 mostly used (and a few new and rare) books, and Bernie has just finished the sorting of a huge estate collection that includes, among many other treasures, "arguably the biggest collection of New York City and State material that I've ever seen outside of a library." Besides New York and Hudson Valley subjects (in which Bernie also keeps an exhaustive stock of current titles, many from regional publishers), Tieger boasts a huge collection of history and Americana, a very good collection of sociology and anthropology, and big collections of philosophy, "which sells, especially to young people," and psychology, "which is not a seller." Another big area is political science (he claims to have the biggest collection of "radicalia" on the East Coast), but he sells that mostly on the Internet (including a large number of conservative titles that "went like hotcakes").

Tieger has a solid collection of fiction and an occasional first edition from an estate, but leaves the serious collecting of rare books by great writers to dealers of a more literary bent. As for the mysteries that Bernie thought would be the mainstay of his store when he first opened a decade ago (an entire room of the shop was actually dubbed "Mystery Manor of Village Books"), he quickly discovered that most readers of the genre want "this afternoon's John Grisham," not yesterday's, and that collectors of anything other than the true classics were "few and far between."

According to Tieger, he gets "at least three to five people a week who tell me they love the shop, that this is the way bookstores used to be." Sometimes these enthusiasts linger so long they apparently get lost in the store's nooks and crannies. It's not unusual that Tieger forgets about the customer who walked in two hours ago and when he's ready to close up and has "started throwing lights," he hears "someone from the back alcove calling 'I'm still here!'"

Main Street Books
Twelve years ago Ken Hubner and Steve Walling started selling used and rare books on weekends out of a small storefront on Main Street in Germantown. Walling was an art director in New York City, and Hubner was the long-time head of the English department at Fieldston, a private preparatory school in Riverdale. But they knew our area well--for more than a decade already they'd been commuting weekends to their country home in Clermont or Germantown Four years ago they moved into their new space in an old, rambling wooden structure around the corner.

Given Hubner's literary background it's no surprise that fiction, and particularly signed, first editions, are one of Main Street's strong suits, and it may be Walling's art background that accounts for the store's wide selection in photography and interior design books. Furthermore, they have a solid and relatively deep children's section, though old children's books are the hardest to find in a store, as they tend to get passed down from generation to generation.

The most significant change since Hubner and Walling started the store is that "The competition for a book is that much harder. At library sales where I used to show up and find ten people in line, there now can be 150 willing to slap down $10 to get in early. "

Hubner is very happy being a little off the beaten track in Germantown: "I can't think of a check that ever bounced, or of anyone who ever returned a book. . . unless it turned out they already owned it and forgot."

The Internet
The computer revolution has had a profound impact on the world of books, but not always in the way pundits have predicted. The advent of Internet bookstores has certainly placed a dent in the business of booksellers Merritt and Oblong. Seasoned book buyers will tell you, though, that the function of Internet booksellers is as much that of publishers' bulletin board as marketplace, and that "shipping & handling" erases almost all of the steeper discount offered. Meanwhile, print-on-demand technology has enabled a huge growth in self-publishing, which by its very nature depends on local authors with connections to local bookstores.

On the other hand, the Internet has entirely changed the nature of the used and rare book marketplace. "From a buyer's point of view," says Bernard Tieger, "There's virtually no book in physical existence that I can't get my hands on for one of my customers." Tieger also urges customers to do their own searches on the Internet, but warns them away from Bibliofind, which was recently taken over by Amazon.com. Since Amazon imposed draconian new selling conditions, most serious used and rare book dealers have stopped listing there, instead preferring sites like abebooks.com.

Some used booksellers, like Ken Hubner of Main Street Books, purposely refuse to list all but a few of their used book "finds" on the Internet: "If you're putting them on the Internet, they're not in the store . . . The worst thing for me is to go into a used bookstore and to find a proprietor poring over the computer. There is no reason for people to come to the store if they don't have the chance to make a find here. This is a reader's and a browser's bookstore, rather than a dealers' bookstore, even if we love dealers."

Look Who Just Walked in the Door!
None of the booksellers interviewed for this piece can claim to make a generous living off their businesses. So what makes them do it? For Scott Meyer , it's that he doesn't "know how to do anything else now. I love the people, I love the staff, I love the customers. Every day I learn something new." For Dick Hermans it's a question of value: "These towns seem to want have a bookstore in their town--it's a more complete place." And for Bernard Tieger, "half the fun of the book business is the distribution of personalities that comes through the door."

In illustration of that point, Bernie likes to recount the time that cartoonist Jules Feiffer came into his store, picked out a couple of his own books and identified himself, "I'm Jules Feiffer." Tieger and Feiffer had been at high school together in the Bronx a half century earlier and hadn't seen each other since. So Tieger looked him over carefully and declared: "Yes you are. . . Julie Feiffer!"

Author's note: Apologies to New Leaf Books in Pine Plains, and the many fine independent stores across the river--Alternative Books, The Golden Notebook, Mirabai, among others. Time and space constraints did not allow me to cover them in this article.