Hoping to address what she sees as a community need, a Bar Harbor resident has renovated a 19th-century barn in the downtown village and is planning to open a bookstore inside.
Hidden Barn Books, located on Kennebec Place directly behind Reel Pizza Cinerama, is expected to open on June 14, according to owner Genie Thorndike.
The barn, originally built in 1883, sat vacant for years but Thorndike has renovated the building while maintaining the rustic look of its interior. She said it has roughly 1,800 square feet of retail space, not including the loft, which she described as “spacious and beautiful.”
Thorndike acknowledged that brick-and-mortar bookstores went through a tough time as e-commerce became widespread at the dawn of the Internet Age, but she is undeterred. She said she wants the store to be a place where people can gather and small events can be held.
“I think there’s room in any community for a local bookstore, where there is a desire to be in a community space and share a love of books,” Thorndike said.
The opening of the bookstore contrasts with the state of the industry more than a decade ago, when bookstore closures were widespread.
One longtime local favorite independent bookstore on Mount Desert Island, Port in a Storm in Somesville, shut down in early 2009. Three years later, the Maine-based chain Mr. Paperback closed all 10 stores it had in the state, which were spread out between Augusta and Presque Isle. In the interim, Borders, a national bookstore chain that also owned Waldenbooks, went bankrupt and shut down all of its stores, including a handful it had in Maine.
But other bookstores have survived. Books-a-Million reopened in some Maine locations left vacant by Borders, Sherman’s has expanded to include nine stores along the coast, and small independent bookstores continue to operate in Belfast, Portland, Bangor, Bucksport and elsewhere in the state.
Thorndike said the continued existence of owner-operator retail booksellers nationwide shows that there is a demand for community-oriented bookstores, where owners can be more responsive to their customers’ needs and can host gatherings for readings or literary talks. She said that on May 18, before the store opens, she has scheduled a public reading in the barn by local poet Christian Barter.
Thorndike said she believes that Bar Harbor is big enough, especially in the summer, to support both her bookstore and Sherman’s, which was founded in Bar Harbor in 1886 and remains a “vital” year-round business.
She said she plans to focus solely on selling books, unlike the variety of items such as art supplies, gifts and toys that Sherman’s also sells, and to have the business be a place where people can sit and linger for a while. She said the bookstore will have a designated room for children’s books and, though she does not plan to sell coffee — there are already plenty of coffee shops in town, she noted — customers will be welcome to bring it with them to enjoy while they browse.
“Independent bookstores are opening up all over the country,” she said. “They are making a comeback, and I’m going to try hard to make it work.”
