For twenty-five years there was a general-interest independent bookstore on the SouthCoast of Massachusetts called Baker Books. It opened in November 1989 in downtown New Bedford, moved out to North Dartmouth in 1995, kept a second location in Fall River for a stretch of the 2000s, and closed for good in 2014. Its motto, printed at the top of every page it ever published, was Purveyors of Information & Imagination.
This site is an independent archive of that store. It is not a shop and never will be again. What survives here is the part worth keeping: the reading lists the booksellers wrote about their own corner of the world, the programmes they ran for a quarter of a century, and the record of a small business that argued — loudly, and for twenty-five years — that a town is better off with a bookshop in it.
What the store was
Baker Books was founded by Ben and Deborah Baker, who had both worked in other trades before deciding to open a bookshop in a downtown that badly needed one. The first store took over a corner of the Cherry & Webb Building on William Street, in the space that had previously held a beauty salon and a shoe department. It was, in the founders' own description, an attempt to contribute something to the vitalisation of the downtown economy — and a business the two of them could build and run together.
Six years later the store moved to a purpose-redesigned building in North Dartmouth, roughly five thousand square feet, holding well over twenty-five thousand titles. The move was made, the store always said, because its own customers asked for it: the surveys kept coming back saying the same thing, that people from the surrounding towns wanted somewhere easier to reach. The new building was given a Tudor facade, deliberately, because one of the founders had worked with the architects to model it on Hay-on-Wye — the small Welsh town, population around three thousand, that somehow supports more than a dozen bookshops. The Dartmouth building was, in the store's own words, an amalgam of several of those shops.
What it was known for
- A local-interest section that was treated as the crown jewel of the store, with shelves on whaling, nautical history, the working fishing fleet, and the Luso-American and Cape Verdean communities of the region.
- An in-store café, the Bean & Leaf, which doubled as the room where readings and children's events happened.
- A used, rare and out-of-print operation, Remains To Be Seen, which started next door and later moved inside.
- A programme of author events, book groups and reading series that was unusually heavy for a store of its size.
- An annual children's poetry contest that ran for more than a decade and drew hundreds of entries a year from schools across the region.
- A yearly observance of Banned Books Week, kept up from 1997 onward.
Why an archive
Most of what a bookshop produces is ephemeral. The shelf-talkers get thrown out, the event flyers get recycled, the newsletters go in the bin. What Baker Books left behind, almost by accident, was several thousand words of genuinely good regional bibliography — annotated lists on whaling, on the New Bedford waterfront, on Portuguese and Cape Verdean immigration, on Fall River, on the small presses of southeastern New England — written by people who read the books and sold them across a counter to their neighbours.
That material still has a reader. It is preserved here, rewritten and updated where the passage of time demanded it, alongside a description of how the store worked and what it tried to do. Where a subject has a proper institutional home — the New Bedford Whaling Museum, for instance, or the New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park — this site points at it rather than pretending to replace it.
Where to start
If you came here for the local-history reading, begin with New Bedford or SouthCoast local history. If you came for the store itself, read the welcome page or about this archive. If you came looking for a book that has gone out of print, the page on hunting out-of-print and award-winning books explains how the store went about it — a method that still works, even though the shop that used it is gone.