Cover to COVER Books: Coming Soon to White River Junction
What’s a town without a bookstore? Readers in and around White River Junction, Vermont won’t need to answer the question. Cover to COVER Books is in progress.
The used-books store is a community effort that is slowly taking shape even while COVER employees stay on task out in the field with their usual business of repairing homes. Workers include COVER’s in-house carpentry staff as well as forty-six volunteers who have spent over 600 hours on the bookstore project since December, 2022. The latest modest milestone? New storefront windows have just been installed.
Helen Hong, COVER’s Executive Director, describes it as “our newest enterprise and an outgrowth of downtown WRJ’s return to a vibrant pedestrian-friendly neighborhood.” The space on South Main Street had been used by COVER primarily as a woodshop and for storage. With its boarded up windows, it appeared to be a shutdown business. Hong explains:
“Over time, as downtown WRJ has become a fun place to explore on foot, the boarded-up front spaces seemed like a missed opportunity. The spaces were next to a busy sidewalk and street and yet closed to the public. Our future home repair office and bookshop, when completed, will open directly into the sidewalk. Given that we are a community-driven organization, it only makes sense to open our doors and invite the public in. It is also important to us that our office will be accessible to the elderly and disabled, which is the majority of the homeowners we assist.”
The bookstore will not only supply reading material to hungry readers. It, as part of the COVER Store, will help to fund COVER’s home repair and weatherization services. “The store is where donated toaster ovens (and books!) are transformed into a wheelchair-accessible ramp or new roof. Having an outward-facing bookstore next to our home-repair office will, hopefully, make the connection clear.”
COVER will welcome patrons into the new space on Friday, October 6, during an open house celebrating COVER’s 25th anniversary. Cover to COVER Books will rely on volunteers to qualify and sort through book donations and to staff the bookstore. (If you are interested, contact Jeff Dumont at jeff@coverhomerepair.org.) Have some books to donate? Click here for donation guidelines regarding condition and types of books accepted. Yes to recent hardcover fiction and biographies, for example; diet books and mildewed encyclopedias are among the unwanted.
For those charting the history of buildings in White River Junction, Helen says that memories live on. “Before COVER purchased the property in 2001, this space had been garage bays for Catamount Brewery. And before Catamount, the building was used as a meat-processing plant for Swift & Co. We still have folks walk in to share with us stories about their time working at Swift & Co. or Catamount.”
(Photos, top and bottom, courtesy of COVER via Helen Hong, Executive Director)
———————————————————
And . . . now we’ve just surged past 2400 subscribers! Thank you! You’re reading Artful, a blog about arts and culture in the Upper Valley, and I hope you’ll subscribe and then share this with your friends and on your social media.
And in case you are wondering . . . Susan B. Apel shuttered a lifelong career as a law professor to continue an interest (since kindergarten) in writing. Her freelance business, The Next Word, includes literary and feature writing; her work has appeared in a variety of lit mags and other publications including Art New England, The Woven Tale Press, The Arts Fuse, and Persimmon Tree. She connects with her neighbors through Artful, her blog about arts and culture in the Upper Valley. She’s in love with the written word.