Hobart Book Village:
A Literary Retreat Hidden in the Catskills
As any true book lover knows, it isn’t enough to read a book, to turn the pages, and carry the stories and characters through the days; there’s also a need to be with books, to be surrounded by them in any way possible. So, the concept of a book village — a community of words and stories strung together in a neat row of shops — is, in my mind, a literary treasure. And stepping into Hobart Book Village feels like stumbling upon a dusty, worn, but well-loved copy of the perfect book.
When musician Don Dales came to Hobart, NY in 1999, to the abandoned main street that now houses the six bookshops that make up the village, you could practically see “tumbleweeds going down the street.” However, there were two bookshops in this middle-of-nowhere Catskills town and Dales knew, from years spent living in the hamlet of High Falls, NY, that “having a village of all the same things was a good idea.” When friends told him about the charming book village of Hay-On-Wye on the Wales/England border, the world’s largest secondhand and antiquarian book center, he thought adding more bookstores to Hobart was the right move. “I went out and bought a lot of bookcases and a lot of books and threw them on the shelves and we had a book village,” says Don.
From its humble beginnings, the Hobart Book Village is now its own eclectic community of passionate bookshop owners. Visitors can explore new and old treasures at six unique shops, from the centuries-old texts of Wm. H. Adams’ Antiquarian Bookshop to the paper ephemera spilling out of boxes at Butternut Valley Books. Bibliophiles will get lost wandering through toppling aisles of poetry, children’s literature, DIY books, mysteries, and more. There’s an annual Festival of Women Writers in September and a short story contest with only one rule: you must mention the town of Hobart at least once. And that’s the essence of exploring Hobart Book Village. It’s a secret within a sentence, a hidden gem tucked quietly inside the Catskill Mountains.
Photos by Rachel Watson, Words by Melissa Sarno