Among the odder and better things Baker Books put its name to was a day trip. Once or twice a year a coach left New Bedford in the early morning, drove to Manhattan, and disgorged a hundred or so readers into Greenwich Village for a day of bookshops. It was called the Book Lovers' Greenwich Village Bookstore Adventure, it was sponsored by the store and organised by a couple of local enthusiasts, and it ran for several years.
The organisers are not named in this archive, and the newspaper article the store originally reproduced on this page is not reproduced here. The description below is the archive's own.
What the day looked like
The premise was simple: within roughly one square mile of Greenwich Village there were, at the time, more than twenty independent new and used bookshops. That density does not exist in most of the United States and it certainly did not exist on the SouthCoast. A day trip could therefore deliver something a local shop could not — sheer variety, walkable.
The package was a round-trip coach fare and an optional guided literary walking tour of authors' homes and hangouts, led by a native New Yorker, with tour maps handed out on the bus. Alongside the maps came a list of the bookshops worth visiting and a set of restaurant descriptions ranging from burgers and pizza upward, so that people could decide where to eat before they arrived.
Crucially, none of it was compulsory. Participants were not obliged to take the walking tour, and were not restricted to bookshops. The instruction was to go where you wanted, do what you liked, and be back at the coach at half past six to show the group what you had found. On one trip a father and daughter went to a Broadway matinée and rejoined the group in the afternoon for a couple of bookshops.
Why the format worked
Everything good about the trip follows from the decision to make the itinerary optional. A structured literary tour appeals to perhaps a third of any coachload; the rest want the city. By providing the structure and then explicitly releasing people from it, the organisers got a full coach instead of a self-selecting minority — and the six-thirty reconvening, with everyone showing what they had bought, gave the day a shared ending without anyone having had a shared middle.
The economics were unarguable too. The fare was less than the cost of driving to New York and parking, which the promotional material pointed out with some relish.
What a bookshop got out of it
Nothing directly. The trip sent a hundred of the store's best customers to spend a day and a good deal of money in other bookshops, several hundred miles away, and the shop's return was the coach fare it did not collect and a day of goodwill.
That is a genuinely unusual piece of thinking. It rests on the assumption — which the store held explicitly and stated often — that the health of independent bookselling as a whole is what keeps any individual independent bookshop alive, and that a customer who spends a day among twenty independent shops comes home a better customer than one who does not. It is the same conviction behind the store's small-press promotion, its trade-association memberships and its Get Lit displays.
Doing it now
The Village bookshop density has thinned considerably since, though a substantial number of independents remain and several of the specialist and antiquarian shops from that era are still trading. The American Booksellers Association maintains the directory of independent bookstores in the United States for anyone assembling a similar route.