Read first, buy second
Buyers read advance copies in the back room and pitch them at the Wednesday meeting. A book needs two champions on staff before it gets a face-out spot.
Salt Marsh Books began when a retired librarian and her daughter hauled eleven crates of secondhand paperbacks up a flight of stairs above a chandlery and opened for a single weekend. The shelves never got emptier, so they stayed, and now there are two floors, six booksellers and a waiting list for window-seat naps.
A shop this size cannot carry everything, so every title has to be argued for by someone who has finished it.
Buyers read advance copies in the back room and pitch them at the Wednesday meeting. A book needs two champions on staff before it gets a face-out spot.
Poets, historians and cookbook writers from the North Shore get a month on the table by the door, whether or not a publisher paid for the space.
A third of the floor is devoted to books more than five years old, because the title you need is rarely the one in this season's catalog.
Tell a bookseller who the present is for and what they hated about their last book. We will wrap three options and let you choose at the register.
Six people, roughly nine thousand books read between them, and opinions on all of them.
There is always a free chair by the window and a kettle on the back counter.