‘We Have Come to Stay’

Early in the fifty-five-year history of the Hampshire Bookshop of Northampton, Massachusetts, Robert Frost described the enterprise as ‘one of the few bookshops in the world where books are sold in something like the spirit they were written in’. ¹ To mark the Bookshop’s twenty-fifth anniversary in 1936, manager Marion Dodd cannily reprinted his words in a limited-edition keepsake, a booklet of Frost’s poems that patrons snapped up and collectors today still seek. Turn the pages of the handsomely printed ‘From Snow to Snow’ and you will readily grasp what set this institution apart, for it encapsulates the founders’ aim to draw author, book, and reader into intimate proximity. This was not only a humanistic goal; it was good business sense, establishing a model for bookselling that persists – though severely challenged by chain-store incursions – nearly a century later.