This was the page that greeted anyone who found the bookstore online, and it is worth keeping more or less as it stood — with the tense corrected, because Baker Books closed in 2014 and the building that housed it has since been taken down.
The store sat in Dartmouth, a suburb of New Bedford on Buzzards Bay, in the southeastern corner of Massachusetts: about thirty miles from Providence, sixty from Boston, and a short ferry ride from Martha's Vineyard or Nantucket. It ran to roughly five thousand square feet of retail space and carried well over twenty-five thousand titles, from children's picture books to how-to manuals on computers and cooking. It described itself, without much modesty and with a certain amount of justification, as your neighbourhood bookstore.
The building
The Dartmouth building is the detail people remember. When the store moved out of downtown New Bedford in 1995, the founders worked with the architects on a Tudor facade — dark timber framing, white panels, sixteenth-century English in flavour — because they wanted it modelled on Hay-on-Wye, the Welsh town of about three thousand people that supports nineteen bookshops. The finished design was not a copy of any one of those shops; it was an amalgam of several. On a suburban highway strip otherwise given over to chain retail, it read as a deliberate argument about what a bookshop is for.
The interior followed the same logic. Sections were arranged the way a reader browses rather than the way a distributor ships, and the room in the northeast corner was given over to the Bean & Leaf Café, which also served as the venue for readings, signings and children's events.
The local-interest shelves
As a Buzzards Bay business, the store took its regional sections seriously — more seriously, by some distance, than its size would predict. The local-interest shelves were kept updated and fully stocked with books on whaling, boat-building, the Portuguese and Cape Verdean communities, and the figures of local consequence: Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Joshua Slocum, and — this being Fall River's near neighbour — Lizzie Borden.
That inventory decision was made early and deliberately. From the beginning the founders wanted a store oriented toward its locality as much as toward their own tastes, tailoring what was on the shelves to the cultural climate of southeastern New England. It is the reason the annotated lists preserved on this site are worth reading twenty years later: they were not assembled from a national bestseller feed.
Special orders and out-of-print searching
The store made a point of its special-order system, on the principle that if a book was in print it could be got. When a book had gone out of print, the search moved next door to Remains To Be Seen, the sister used, rare and remainder shop, which later merged into the main store. Between them they covered the whole range from a new paperback to a signed first edition with the jacket mylared.
What the store believed
Behind all of it was a stated commitment to the continued existence of the independent bookshop, which the founders believed offered a much-needed and much-desired alternative to the corporate chains. That was written on the site in the 1990s, when the chains looked unstoppable, and it stayed there until the end. The store also worked steadily with area schools and libraries on literacy, on the straightforward theory that universal literacy is paramount to the success of a community — a position the American Booksellers Association and the New England Independent Booksellers Association, both of which counted Baker Books as a member, have spent decades arguing.
The store is gone. The reading lists, the programmes and the argument are what this archive keeps.