It’s no surprise that local bookstores carry stores of local books. And yet those books can be difficult to uncover.
Used bookstore Book Trader Cafe’s local books section can’t be found, because, apparently, it no longer exists. Books about New Haven and Connecticut used to cluster on the shelves next to the line where you order your lunch or coffee, but they weren’t there yesterday, and the staff on shift seemed unaware that there had ever been any such section at all. That said, in light of how Book Trader builds its inventory (by buying it from the community), even a single seller shedding a collection of locally interested books could get Book Trader back in the game.
One block east at Atticus Bookstore Cafe, the books are all new, and the local books, numbering only a contemporary and curated handful you may have to squint to spot, can be found along the righthand wall, sharing a shelf with statewide and regional subject matter. Books here include James Magruder’s just-published The Play’s the Thing, “an insider’s spirited history of Yale Repertory Theatre,” and Lary Bloom’s I’ll Take New Haven, a collection of essays adding up to a 2022 memoir about retiring in the Elm City. But the newest items in the section, according to a helpful clerk, are copies of the privately published Recollections and Reflections on Yale, whose author, the legendary administrator Sam Chauncey—hired as a dean while still an undergraduate—had just dropped them off, with a few signed copies you may have to sift to find.
Sifting is just what you feel like doing a couple blocks north, in the collegiately cluttered front room of Grey Matter Books. The used bookstore’s local section is hidden in plain sight, its residents huddled in the lowest leftmost shelves of the wall behind the register. Current offerings, many of them narrow or obscure, exhibit a heavy but not exclusive focus on Yale, ranging from a 1912 edition of The Yale Banner and Pot Pourri, the long-running student yearbook (which has since dropped the “and Pot Pourri” bit), to Old Blue Corpse (2005), “a New Haven mystery,” to a history of the Second Company of the Governor’s Foot Guard, New Haven’s Revolutionary War-era militia. Other history titles include The Italian American Experience in New Haven (2006) and even a chronicle of some of New Haven’s other chroniclers: Richard Hegel’s Nineteenth-Century Historians of New Haven (1972), inscribed and signed on the title page with a curious postscript: “Copy No. 5.”
Number four (and last) on my tour of local bookstores’ local book stores was the Yale Bookstore. Aside from a few select books mixed into a display of school merch—plus, if you count them, a dozen shelves brimming with books by Yale authors—the local books section here comprises four “U.S. History” shelves upstairs. The titles read mostly as commercially considered takes on Connecticut: a book about the state’s pirates and privateers, or a few Halloween-timed books covering its “cryptids” (“creatures that are believed to exist but never proven to exist”), ghost stories and “abandoned asylums.” New Haven-specific options include Chip Malafronte and Jim Shelton’s Hockey Haven: How Yale and Quinnipiac Made It to the Top of the Hockey Game (2013) and Michael J. Bielawa’s Wicked New Haven (2013), a book promising to highlight “all manner of sin and scandal” in the city’s history—including during the early years, from 1638, when New Haven was organized as a Puritan theocracy.
An awful lot has changed since then. And thanks in part to our local bookstores, we can read all about it.
Written and photographed by Dan Mims. Images feature local book sections at (1) Atticus Bookstore Cafe, (2) Grey Matter Books and (3) the Yale Bookstore.
