At Hobart
November, 2022
November, 2022
It's a hamlet in Delaware County, about a half-hour drive east from Oneonta. To get to Hobart, you take a scenic drive on two-lane blacktop roads that wind through the Catskill mountains and landscapes showcasing valleys, rolling fields, and farmhouses. And a power line maintenance depot (below).
Hobart's Main Street, which isn't very long, has - depending on the source - anywhere from five to eight used book stores, all operating out of repurposed residential and commercial buildings (the site of Liberty Rock Books, pictured above, is a former car dealership / garage).
I didn't have sufficient time to check out the other stores on the main street, but I think I will return to Hobart in the future.
Other than the bookstores there's not much else in Hobart, besides a little antiques place and a Mirabito gas station. If you want a restaurant meal, or overnight lodging, you'll likely have to head north up Route 10 to Stamford. So a visit to Hobart is best approached as an all-day affair dedicated solely to looking at books............
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2 comments:
Very interesting! Do you know why the small town has so many used bookstores? In my large city they mostly have gone out of business.
According to the articles about Hobart that I've found online, there apparently was a conscious decision, made by the proprietors of the few stores that opened at the beginning of the century, to cultivate the place as a kind of U.S. counterpart to the Hay on Wye 'book village' in the UK.
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