Announcing Our Summer Partner Bookseller: Browseabout Books, Rehoboth Beach
by Ann Kjellberg, editor
Image of Browseabout Books by Susan Thornburg featured on a bookstore puzzle.
In 1975 Steve and Barbara Crane, who were teachers in Wilmington, Delaware, started a summertime bookstore in the vacation town of Rehoboth Beach. Rehoboth was founded in 1873 as a site for Methodist camp meetings. Its mile-long boardwalk is among the classics of the form, built around the time of the first American boardwalks in Atlantic City and Virginia Beach. The current site of the shop they founded, on Rehoboth Avenue, was on the route of the first train that brought vacationers seeking relief from summer heat to Rehoboth from Pennsylviania and northern Delaware. When the shop moved from the first block off the boardwalk to the second, where it now occupies what used to be a small open-air mall, “People said, ‘You’re never going to make it down there,’” Steve recalled. ‘Nobody is going to walk off that first block.’” They were wrong.
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