About Baker Books. Baker Books was a general-interest independent bookstore that traded in New Bedford and Dartmouth, Massachusetts, from 1989 until it closed in 2014. This site covers that store, the reading community it served and the SouthCoast subjects it was known for. It is independent and non-commercial. It is not connected in any way to Baker Publishing Group of Ada, Michigan, or to that company's Baker Books imprint — an unrelated business that happens to share the name. Nothing here is for sale, and no book listed on this site is offered by, or on behalf of, any publisher or retailer.
What this site is
It is a record of a shop. Between 1989 and 2014 a bookstore called Baker Books traded on the SouthCoast of Massachusetts — first on William Street in downtown New Bedford, then in a purpose-designed building in North Dartmouth, and for part of the 2000s in Fall River as well. Over those years it published a website that accumulated, without any particular plan, a substantial body of regional bibliography and a detailed account of its own programmes.
The material covers the store's reading lists and programmes. This site provides no hours, ordering, mailing list or loyalty-club signup.
What this site is not
- It is not a shop. Nothing on any page is for sale. There is no cart, no order form, no price list, no affiliate link, and no stock. Where a book is named, it is named as a bibliographic fact, the way a library catalogue names it.
- It is not the publisher. There is a well-established Christian publishing house in Ada, Michigan called Baker Publishing Group, one of whose active imprints is also named Baker Books. That company has no relationship of any kind to the Massachusetts bookstore this site records, and no relationship to this site. The names coincide; nothing else does.
- It is not a directory of people. The store's records named a great many private individuals — staff, customers, prize-winning schoolchildren, local volunteers. None of those names are included here. The programmes are described; the participants are not identified. That is a deliberate editorial decision and it will not be revisited.
Privacy, rights and scope
Three editorial rules apply. First, past tense: the store closed in 2014 and every page says so. Second, no private identities: personal names, towns, schools, ages and photographs are left out, while the programmes are described generically. Third, copyrighted third-party text is omitted: publisher jacket copy, trade-review text and newspaper articles are not included.
Authors who appeared at advertised public events are named because those appearances are matters of public record. Nothing has been invented about any of them.
Reference and further reading
For the subjects the store specialised in, the serious institutional collections are the place to go next. The New Bedford Whaling Museum's research topics cover the whaling industry in depth; Digital Commonwealth aggregates digitised material from Massachusetts libraries, museums and historical societies; and the Massachusetts Historical Society holds manuscript collections reaching back to the colonial period.
If you are looking for the bookshop itself: it is not there any more. The building was taken down after the store closed. What is left is on these pages.