The Book Barn in Niantic creates community for book lovers

By Emi­ly Sharkis
Fea­ture Writ­ing Class
April 28, 2024

Step­ping onto the prop­er­ty of the main loca­tion of the Book Barn in Niantic, Con­necti­cut feels like enter­ing a new world. Bright red pic­nic tables, lush green­ery, and play­ground equip­ment all evoke a sense of child­like won­der. One might think the Barn was a nurs­ery school if not for the main attrac­tion: thou­sands of used books. 

“Dur­ing the busiest sum­mer buy­ing sea­son, it’s stan­dard for us to pur­chase any­where from ten to fif­teen thou­sand books a week,” said long­time Book Barn cus­tomer and employ­ee Glenn Shea. 

Many bib­lio­philes enjoy the wide vari­ety of titles. “It’s like a lit­tle trea­sure hunt,” said UConn junior Emi­ly Good­win, “When I first get [to the Book Barn], I’m not over­whelmed. I feel this boost of joy being sur­round­ed by books. Books just make me so hap­py because I know that every sin­gle one of them can take you away.” 

While the Barn is known for hav­ing one-off copies of rare finds, the young adult sec­tion har­bors plen­ty of mul­ti­ples: rows of John Green nov­els, dystopi­an clas­sics, and an entire shelf ded­i­cat­ed to copies of If I Stay by Gayle Forman. 

The main build­ing at the Main Barn holds an expan­sive young adult sec­tion, where cus­tomers can often find an adorable cat named Cheesepuff. 

Good­win, who just so hap­pens to be my room­mate, calls this sec­tion her favorite. “It’s very nos­tal­gic for me because it’s all these books that I want­ed to read or had read dur­ing my child­hood,” said Goodwin. 

The Book Barn also has two oth­er loca­tions. The Book Barn Down­town is a three minute dri­ve from the Main Barn. Pur­chased as an over­flow space, the Book Barn Down­town is full to the brim with children’s lit­er­a­ture, fan­ta­sy, and unique titles such as How to Sur­vive a Shark­na­do and Oth­er Unnat­ur­al Dis­as­ters by Andrew Shaffer. 

 Opened in May 2014, Chap­ter Three sits right down the road from the Main Barn. This cozy spot sells Book Barn appar­el and has a focus on romance, enter­tain­ment, and mil­i­tary titles. Vis­i­tors of Chap­ter Three are often greet­ed by the feline trio of cats Rose­mary, Thyme, and Cutiepie. The expan­sive prop­er­ties and unique quirks make the Book Barn feel like more than just a used book store. 

“Many teach­ers bring their class­es to the Barn stores as days out, and because the main prop­er­ty has play areas — swings, a slide, a play­house, kid cars, a chess set–as well as a sup­ply of cats and goats, they react to the Barn as if they were hav­ing recess,” said Shea, “We often hear sto­ries from par­ents who tell us their child asked to come to the Barn for their birthdays.” 

Good­win first found out about the Book Barn through a Google search last sum­mer. Dri­ving down from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Con­necti­cut took my friends and I about an hour, but com­pared to some of the Barns’ oth­er cus­tomers, this dis­tance is rel­a­tive­ly short. 

“We get vis­i­tors reg­u­lar­ly now from all over, rang­ing from a cou­ple who’d dri­ven from Penn­syl­va­nia express­ly to vis­it the Barn, to a fam­i­ly I see every year…that live in India, who come to buy books for their kids and bring me the gos­sip about what’s going on in Del­hi,” said Shea. 

Part of the rea­son peo­ple trav­el far and wide for the Barn is that they do not offer any kind of online shop­ping. When Ran­di and Mau­reen White opened the Book Barn in 1988, online book­selling was not near­ly as pop­u­lar as it is now. Plus, “Ran­di want­ed to build the store up to have enough books to draw peo­ple in from a dis­tance,” said Shea. 

One of the biggest draws to used book­stores is the fact that their stock is often priced quite low. A fact that Shea says could not exist if the Barn went online. 

“If we sold online we’d have to raise prices pre­cip­i­tous­ly, as we’d need to hire at least two more peo­ple to do the cat­a­loging and mail orders…Because the prices are low we have the best turnover I’ve ever seen in a sec­ond­hand book­shop; we reg­u­lar­ly cull and dol­lar old stock. So all of this hangs togeth­er: peo­ple will come a good dis­tance to find cheap books, we’re the only place local­ly that offers cash as well as store cred­it for books, and so all this saves us from hav­ing to deal with sell­ing online. Ran­di did­n’t want the best and rarest of our stock going out to some­one sit­ting at home in Nebraska–he want­ed to pull peo­ple in, and it’s worked,” said Shea. 

It’s not just the low prices that draw in cus­tomers, how­ev­er, it’s also the large sense of com­mu­ni­ty that can be felt at all three Book Barn locations. 

This sense of com­mu­ni­ty starts with the book­sellers them­selves. “The empha­sis when [Ran­di and store man­ag­er T. Hagan] inter­view or hire is that we all sup­port each oth­er when some­one needs a day off, or has a med­ical emer­gency, so on and on. I know this sounds like cor­po­rate­s­peak, but it’s always great to see it in the flesh. I think this is vis­i­ble to the peo­ple who come to vis­it and shop, and they often become part of the place as well,” says Shea, “I can’t tell you how often, when a cus­tomer has asked me a ques­tion I can’t answer, the answer has been called out by one of our reg­u­lar cus­tomers, kib­itz­ing from the side.” 

As for the future, Shea says he hopes to keep up the good work, with­out any major changes. “God knows we have enough books, and we have enough cus­tomers. If some­thing’s work­ing as it should, you try not to jim­my with it.”