All Booked Up
November 6 2007
When Princeton’s beloved, quirky Micawber Books closed earlier this year, the New York Times called it the end of an era.
But some dozen independent bookstores in New Jersey have not succumbed to the combined assault of the Internet and the two giant chains one local shop owner called “They Whose Name Must Not Be Mentioned.” She and fellow bookstore owners want to offer what the big boys can’t, or won’t.
At Book Trader in Hamilton Township you can buy a used edition of the multi-volume Groves Dictionary of Music for $150—a new set is $1,200 online at Barnes & Noble. Something less esoteric? Owner Joan Silvestri has more than 40 Danielle Steel titles—more than you’ll find at the Borders on your local highway.
Service, too, is important. “People come here because we drop everything to help somebody find what they want,” says Anne Laird of Town Bookstore, which has been in Westfield since 1934. She sells new books, each one brought in only after the staff decides it’s good.
Some locals, like Wishmaker Books (609-324-9909) in quaint Farnsworth Ave. in Bordentown, specialize in first editions and antique books. Another like that is Cranbury Book Worm; you can spend a rainy afternoon wandering the ramshackle Victorian that houses it.
Others get new titles that fly below the radar. “People will come in and say, ‘I have never seen that book anywhere else,’” says Margot Sage-El, owner of Watchung Booksellers in Montclair for 12 years. “We get ideas from the community, which is very well read.” Reader- and writer-rich Montclair is one of the few towns in the state with two book shops. The other is Montclair Book Center (www.montclairbookcenter.com), at 15,000 square feet one of the largest independent stores in the state.
Another town with more than one book shop is Princeton, where Deb Hunter hopes her two shops will fill the void left by Micawber. The one on Nassau Street, Glen Echo Books, specializes in rare “previously read” high brow books—this is Princeton, after all. Her second store, Chicklet Books in the Princeton Shopping Center, is being remodeled and will be what she calls a “full service” bookstore with café. She also owns the original Chicklet, up Rt. 206 in Hillsborough, where she supplies “book clubs, what all the women are reading.”
The website www.bookweb.org makes ordering from local bookstores as easy as ordering from Amazon. Well, almost as easy. But it helps local bookshops stay in business. And it gives you the address of all its New Jersey members. So you can buy books the old fashioned way: go see what’s there, inside the bricks and mortar.
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