#6 Brookline Booksmith

Brookline Booksmith
279 Harvard Street
Brookline, MA 02446

617-566-6660

 

 

 

Here’s a bookstore that works so well with its neighborhood that a competing corporate chain retailer recently called it quits and closed down.  Brookline Booksmith sits on bustling Harvard St. in Brookline, MA.  The book store and its owners are involved in the surrounding community, and could serve as a model for civic engagement.  They serve as board members of local nonprofits, partner with schools, and host a reading series at the local Coolidge Corner Theater.  

Five minutes in this store, and one of the clerks begins handselling  me Primo Levi’s short story collection A TRANQUIL STAR.  He’s so sincere about it, that I’m curious and I buy it, and then I look around.  Customers are milling about the store’s main level, and I find more people downstairs in the used books section.

One of the owners, Dana Brigham, meets me and shows me around.  She says that Brookline Booksmith reinvents itself as needed and serves the community by providing life-learning for as many of its customers as possible.

This is so clearly a working model for a book store I ask her if they have considered adding more locations.  

She informs me of a second location — Wellesely Booksmith, but shakes her head and says they have, in fact, turned down offers to grow into shopping malls.  

A great bookstore that really works!  

#1 A Cappella Book

 

storefront

 

A Cappella Books
484-C Moreland Ave.
Atlanta, GA 30307
404-681-5128

 

 

 

Frank Reiss was a Classics major at UGA in Athens, GA when Athens was ATHENS!!!  He came of age in its glory days alongside REM and the B52s.  Bookselling is in his blood.  His father is a bookseller in Alabama.  Frank opened A Cappella in 1989 in what was Atlanta’s only pedestrian-friendly neighborhood at the time, Little 5 Points.  He sells both new and used titles.  In the last ten years, both chains have opened stores within walking distance.  Frank shrugs them off.

“I’ll never have as much capital as those guys,” he says while going through a stack of used books to purchase.  “It’s impossible for me to compete.  So instead of focusing on what they have and trying to outdo them, I emphasize the things in my store that bring customers in, in the first place.”

And in looking at the stacks at A Cappella Books it’s striking to see just how personal his collection is.  Frank hand-selects his books, and the store seems more like the neighborhood’s curated library than its book store.  A Cappella has the neighborhood’s soul on its shelves, and Frank credits that soul for keeping him in business.

You find interesting books here.  I find Jean Genet’s Querelle on the shelves.   He also carries a great selection of books on indie music.  He’s even started publishing!  Small runs of out-of-print books and one newer title, a memoir by Peter Case

as for cultural and economic impact, Frank frequently works with his neighbors to host readings and events on subject matter interesting to them.  A Cappella is almost a neighborhood speaker’s bureau.

 

Frank Reiss