Summer Partner Bookseller: Northshire!
Northshire Bookstore’s welcoming book portal in Manchester (photo Christine Glade for Seven Days); celebrating ten years in Saratoga Springs; Nicole Ihasz with a bunny
We are delighted to announce our Summer 2024 Bookseller Partner, the Northshire Bookstores in Manchester, Vermont, and Saratoga Spring, New York! Please join us in bringing them your book business this summer.
Northshire Bookstore was founded by Ed and Barbara Morrow in 1976 in the idyllic southern Vermont town of Manchester. (Before your thoughts turn hobbity: Manchester is literally the “north shire” of the two “shire towns” of Bennington County, the south one being Bennington.) Manchester lures visitors from the not-too-far-away cities with its panoramic trails and family-sized skiing, while retaining its generational connection to village and farm life. (Citydwellers’ attraction to Manchester goes all the way back to the surely exhausted son of Abraham Lincoln, Robert, whose celebrated spread there, Hildene, is open to visitors.) The Morrows soon moved their store into a sprawling and picturesque former roadside inn at the village crossroads: a 2014 New York Times guide to weekending in Manchester described the store as the “centerpiece” of the town Center, a “decades-old behemoth of a shop [with] a play den, a cafe and endless rows of books.” There it became a point of sustenance and connection for far-flung rural families all around, included the three Ihasz sisters, who had moved to a farm in nearby Danby from suburban Long Island as teenagers and spent long winters noodling over books in its stacks (they found it “a great place to hang out with friends and study,” reports the Manchester Journal). They grew up to take over the place in 2022.
Cathleen, Nicole, and Ashley credited Vermont life with the spirit of sisterly togetherness that had them doing business as a family long before Northshire. The Morrows ran the store for forty-five years (their son Chris became manager in 2001), and then passed it to a local couple with many ties to the town, Clark and Lu French, in 2021 (Chris reflected movingly on growing up in a bookstore—literally; they lived in the basement—for the occasion). In those lethal years, though, Lu tragically died suddenly, leaving Northshire in an even more perilous position than the rest of bookselling. Fortuitously, Cathleen, Nicole, and Ashley, who like many had turned their attention homeward when the pandemic struck, came to the rescue (Clark French has retained an ownership interest and remains involved). The family spirit prevails all around. “There are people who've come here since they were kids and now are bringing their kids or even their grandchildren,” says Nicole. “It's a family kind of place.”
So you can see in Northshire many of the features that can make independent bookselling nourish and thrive: a close community for which it can be an anchor and a resource; refreshing influxes of visitors; the devoted attention of generations of committed owners who managed to overcome the perils of succession. Its current staff has nearly a hundred years of combined service to the store. Chris Morrow referred to the experience of Northshire’s booksellers, and their labors training up new recruits, people who read a lot and can both assemble a rich selection of books and advise customers out of deep knowledge, as key to the store’s longevity.
The places we go when we go there by choice rather than necessity, it seems, create hospitable environments for outposts of culture. Chris Morrow considered bookselling a “kind of a promotion of culture in a way. I was telling the staff a lot of what we do here we’re in service to our customers, to each other, to the book as a physical thing, and to the larger culture of this country.” In 2013 he made the decision to expand and create a Northshire outpost in Saratoga Springs, New York, an hour and change away. An inspired and compatible choice!
Saratoga Springs represents an even older manifestation of the retreat countryward than contemporary farm-to-table and athliesure enthusiasms, predating cars and trains and steamships: the spa. Saratoga Springs is geologically home of the Serachtague spring, the “place of swift water,” the only naturally carbonated mineral springs east of the Rocky Mountains, which its Mohawk patrons considered sacred and to which they brought British officer William Johnson, stationed in nearby Fort Saratoga, to treat war wounds way back in 1767. The spring was attracting tourists before the nineteenth century, becoming our own Marienbad, Baden-Baden, Bath, Vichy—refuges where “society” strolled about in their summer ensembles , taking the healing waters under the blameless auspices of health. Travelling to escape the pestilential city had its most intense expression in travelling to “take the cure,” healing waters, mountain air, ocean bathing. Finding themselves stranded in these geologic outposts naturally called forth a need for diversion, often in the form of gambling (see also Monte Carlo, Palm Springs) and, here, horse racing, for which Saratoga Springs remains famous. Its track, the oldest in America—indeed, apparently the nation’s oldest “sports facility”—is known affectinately as “The Spa.” This year it hosted the Triple Crown’s Belmont Stakes while the Belmont track in Long Island was under construction. At one point, we are told, Saratoga Springs had more bars per capita than anywhere in the US. There are still spigots of natural spring water to be found around town, contributing to its enduring character as a “walkable” place, like outdoorsy Manchester—perfect circumstances for a bookstore.
Read Book Post on summertime bookstores and libraries; English bookstores abroad; on summer bookselling in Maine (Print in Portland), New Hampshire (Gibson’s in Concord), and the Delaware Shore (Browseabout in Rehoboth Beach)
Saratoga Springs has, along with the rest of greater New York, had its ups and downs (prohibition, and like-minded campaigns against gambling, took their toll on its signature industries; a tradition of remonstrance carried on today by animal rights advocates), but this deep root and its aquatic source give the town a durable draw as a place of retreat, renewal, and refreshment. It remains the summer home of the New York City Ballet and the Philadelphia Orchestra, the writers’ retreat Yaddo, Skidmore College and its Summer Writers’ Institute (which brings me there this week: see its impressive roster of summer readings). It was, with the collapse of Borders in 2011 primed for a bookstore.
Both the Northshire bookstores are rich, dynamic places that serve their communities and flourish in them, but in both cases their presence is not a forgone conclusion: they are there because of the dedication and tenacity of those who love them. (Northshire’s Saratoga Springs expansion was supported by over thirty local investors.) Their destinies become identified with their towns’. We’ve written about how Malaprop’s in Asheville (another historic mountain getaway), like many bookstores, was a driver of the town’s revival. Bookstores, like a thriving town, are an equilibrium of old and new, places to preserve and to look ahead. They are embodiments of the essential vacation reminder: people are a lot more than their jobs, and ideas—and the books and other arts that carry them—feed those larger selves. Bookstores make a natural way-station at the crossroads, a place to pause and recollect and grow.
Ann Kjellberg is the founding editor of Book Post.
Watch our social media for news of the goings on this summer at Northshire! @bookpostusa
As we bid adieu to our spring partner, City Lights in San Francisco, one last encouragement to read their legendary bookseller Paul Yamazaki’s memoir-in-conversation, Reading the Room: A Bookseller’s Tale. It’s a splendid illustration of bookselling as spiritual project, community service, form of activism, higher education, and time-capsule creation.
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The Northshire is such a special place! I spent many happy hours there as a kid on fall visits to Vermont. I still remember some books I got there!