old number 6 book depot

I've been stopping by the Book Depot for many years, and it's always a real treat. It's essentially a barn packed from floor to ceiling with well-organized books of all kind (attached to a sprawling country house that serves as the storage area for the next wave of books to be shelved as volumes find a home). You'll find some very unusual and esoteric titles and subjects here. One could literally spend hours browsing, which I have certainly done. You’ll find books you never knew existed and you had to own. It's a cozy environment, heated with a wood stove and with a special New England, old school, rural feel to it. My favorite urban bookstores are the Brattle Book Shop in Boston and The Strand in NYC, but this is my hands down favorite country shop. Swing by if you're anywhere even close, as you won't be disappointed! Daniels in Henniker village, just a minute down the hill, is a nice casual riverside pub type spot lunch or dinner if you work up an appetite from all that book hunting. It’s also been around for many years and is an old standby.

I first discovered this bookstore more than thirty years ago. It has long been one of my favorite antique bookstores. It is set on the outskirts of Henniker, a typical New England town. The town itself warrants spending time exploring. The bookstore is well organized and easy to navigate. There are two floors. Being an Imperial Russian history buff I immediately head for the history section, which is extensive and well categorized. I admit I am likely to meander into other sections. While there it is impossible to not wonder though and look at the artifacts that are located throughout the store. It is possible to spend hours here. It is one of the best antique bookstores in the northeast and a destination for any antique book lover.

Since I’m an academic, it’s probably not surprising that my trips include a fair number of visits to bookstores — especially used bookstores. My list includes the usual suspects: Shakespeare and Company in Paris, the Strand in New York, City Lights in San Francisco, etc.. But it also includes various odd and out of the way places, from the peculiar little place near the docks in Moss Landing, CA (where I picked up a copy of Erich Maria Remarque’s émigré novel Arch of Triumph) to the New England Traveler Restaurant and Bookstore in Connecticut, just south of the Massachusetts Border (where my wife got a copy of Lampedusa’s *The Leopard* as part of an "eat dinner, get a book" promotion). The “Old Number Six” goes to near top of my list of the odd, the out of the way, and the memorable.Located up a hill from the campus of New England College in Henniker, New Hampshire, its two floors are a warren of bookshelves, towering floor to ceiling. Started in the 1970s by two faculty members from the college, it houses a massive collection on a staggering variety of topics. One of its more impressive features is the care that has gone into its organization. The general categories (e.g., “History” — which occupies much of the second floor) are broken down into subcategories (e.g., books on European history are divided by country or by period, depending on the focus and there is a separate section for “Historians and Historiography”). Just as impressive is the quality of the collection: out of print titles from university presses abound and any annotations in them tend to be discrete (and, at least for the ones I saw, in pencil). With the rise of behemoths like Amazon, independent booksellers like this are becoming an endangered species and the experience of browsing through stacks and finding books that you weren’t looking for but, upon finding them, are obviously what you need to have is becoming ever rarer. Searching in the Literary Criticism section to see what they had on Thomas Mann, I came across Paul Fussell’s Abroad, a study on interwar tourism that was the unlikely sequel to Fussell’s path-breaking The Great War and Modern Memory. What better book to find, while wandering in a bookstore that I came across by accident, than a book about the peculiarities of tourism. It wasn't what I was looking for, but it was just what I needed!