The Book Barn, Niantic, Connecticut
The Book Barn: A Great Place to Find Books (and Cats)
It can be hard for small businesses to thrive even in the best of times, but in the current economy it’s becoming harder and harder to find independently owned stores still afloat. The Book Barn, located near the beach in Niantic, is one of those rare places that is not only independently owned, but also really cool. With a main barn, outdoor displays, smaller supplementary buildings crammed with books, as well as a downtown and midtown location, The Book Barn offers an experience you’d be hard-pressed to find at a chain bookstore.
The Book Barn’s self-professed mission is “to serve as a provider of books, uniting people and books together in biblioholic bliss,” and with over 350,000 used volumes currently in stock, I’d have to say it does a pretty good job. The store is so large that it requires signposts to point the way to each section: The Main Barn, where you can find assorted classics and books on war and art history, plus the cash register; Ellis Island, where new book arrivals are bought and sorted; The Annex, which contains fiction and poetry; Hades, which houses travel books and a few mysteries; The Haunted, which has the rest of the mysteries and thrillers; and The Last Page, which contains a lot of science, nature, and outdoors books (as does the former outhouse standing outside it).
The midtown and downtown locations are located just a few minutes away in the small center of the town of Niantic; the barn and other areas are just on the periphery. It’s a great atmosphere for walking around outside, and since The Book Barn offers no online sales or computerized system of organization, you literally never know what you’ll find here. This past summer I found a gilt-edged, color illustrated, hard-cover copy of Moby Dick for $8. The summer before, I found an entire boxed set of the Dark is Rising series. You can find history books, books about camping, books about psychology, photography, or cooking, biographies, a large selection of fiction (both classic and modern), and a lot of things that can only be classified as oddities. One year I found a strange paperback from the 1970s about a frog man who had been created as a government experiment and then escaped to find true love.
You can easily get lost for several hours in The Book Barn. It’s open every day except Thanksgiving and Christmas from 9am to 9pm; if you go, you’re sure to be welcomed by at least four of the 20 cats that prowl around and sleep on random available surfaces. (There are also goats if you’re into that, although luckily they’re in a pen and not wandering freely.) It’s the kind of place that always has something new and surprising, like giant footprints painted on the ground and chess sets sitting outside for people to use. It’s also located in a town that has an abundance of seafood and ice cream, so really, what more could you ask for?
In addition to selling used books, The Book Barn also buys them; there’s no guarantee they’ll take all your books, but the ones they do accept will earn you either cash or store credit.
The Book Barn is located at 41 West Main Street, the downtown location at 269 Main Street, and the midtown location at 291 Main Street in Niantic. Visit www.bookbarnniantic.com for more information.
–Sarah Alender is a Contributor to The Free George.
The Free George is the online magazine and visitors’ guide of Upstate NY, covering things from Albany to Lake Placid, including Saratoga, the Lake George region and the Adirondacks. Check out our City Blogs section for our extended coverage areas as well.