Shopping

An Outsider That’s Inside: A Day in the Life of BookHampton, a Beloved Bookstore

By Kevin Redding

15 minute 07/04/2023

Manager Jesse Bartel is the face of BookHampton

Strolling down Main Street in East Hampton, you’re surrounded by high-end fashion boutiques: Louis Vuitton, Valentino, Loro Piana, Nili Lotan, Prada. There’s an upscale Italian cafe and elegant eateries. Everything’s chic and boasts a brand name.

But right next to Starbucks, the BookHampton storefront stands out from the rest, that doesn’t quite fit in. Homier, more old-fashioned.

Like an eye-catching cover you have to pluck from the shelf, the village’s quaint independent bookstore — a brick building with an archway entrance, a hanging dark ocean blue-colored sign, a display of fiction in one window and a collection of board games and puzzles in the other, a chalkboard announcing upcoming author events — must be explored.

Plus, the promise of sifting through physical books and bonding with others over them. For a certain type, this might as well be a church.

“I was just walking and was like, ‘Oh! Great! I was looking for a bookstore!’” says Samantha Gasmer, in town for the weekend from Manhattan. “Just to go through and see books and touch them and feel them, I’ve always been into that … and the smell is the best.”

“You can’t find these anywhere, it’s such a rarity,” says Nelly Ackerman, visiting from Westchester with her young son, Keith.

“These places are so important,” says Matthew Minor from Washington, D.C. “It’s so much more than just pushing books. This is for conversation and to build community.”

“It’s like a refuge,” says Andrew Wallace, a former resident who now lives in Miami. “For me, bookshops remind me of the diversity of the world … and also give me that feeling that I’m never gonna read all the books in the world, and that makes me a bit sad!”

“I love this place,” says Ken Maxwell, a full-time East Hampton resident since the pandemic. “I think there are few places that feel nostalgic still, especially in this town. People come to East Hampton to buy something expensive, but this is like … ‘Ahhh, they have a bookstore.’ I mean, look at the buzz in here.”

Not long after manager Jesse Bartel unlocks and props open the front door at 10 a.m. on a cloudy Saturday this past Father’s Day weekend, BookHampton is bursting with life.

Locals, out-of-towners, tourists, vacationers, folks who work in the village, families, kids, returning college students, seniors, solo shoppers, those on a mission, browsers, beachgoers in need of a good beach read and a ton of four-legged friends trickle in and out.

“I like when it’s a little crazy,” Bartel says with a smile.

Over the course of the morning and afternoon, Bartel, an upbeat 34-year-old sporting black-rimmed glasses, greets regulars by name, and chats and laughs with new customers. He helps parents find the right book for their kids.

“That’s a good recommendation, thank you, Jesse!” one says.

He fields lots of questions.

“I’m shopping for a girl with two dads. Is this a good book?” another asks.

Bartel speaks rhapsodically about Tomorrow Tomorrow Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin to Adrianne Silver, an 80-year-old Manhattanite summering in the Hamptons who is in search of what “everybody is reading now.”

“I go to dinner parties, and I give out books,” Silver says. “The service here is terrific. They always remember me.”

Bartel gift-wraps items and stands on ladders to retrieve high-shelved books.

“Here you go, boss man!” he says, ringing someone out. The day prior, Jimmy Fallon popped into the store, and Bartel greeted him with, “Hey, Jimbo! Do you need anything?

“I treat everybody exactly the same,” he says, laughing.

But as jovial as he is to shoppers, he goes above and beyond when a French bulldog trots in. “Maverick!” he exclaims, dropping to the floor to pet the happy dog. He grabs a treat from one of the big boxes behind the counter.

Everybody’s excited, chipper and at ease inside the airy, high-ceilinged haven made by and for book lovers.

“No one comes into the bookstore mad,” Bartel says. “It’s a different shopping experience. It’s really just supposed to be fun.”

“Jesse is such a treasure trove of knowledge, and every time he’s referred a book to me, I always know I’m gonna love it,” says Eliza Damiecki, an East Hampton resident and regular. “He knows me, he knows the writers I like. That kind of intimacy is great when you go to a bookstore. I’m so happy he’s here when I come in because I know I’ll always leave with something I really love.”

When he’s not helping customers, and his four to seven employees (depending on the season), Bartel does what he calls “The Terminator scan” around the shop — rearranging books to accommodate what’s selling and what isn’t. He also handles offsite events — selling books at house parties for local authors and at other businesses.

On one side of the store, customers survey a long table spread of new hardcover fiction — “Hello Beautiful is a phenahhhmenal book,” a woman points out to a friend — and the various sections laid out across walls and shelves: Fiction, Mystery, Art, Style, Interiors, Architecture, Health, Children’s, Young Adult, Biographies.

Three people crowd around a photography book; a little kid in a hat thumbs through a graphic novel; and bookseller extraordinaire and author Eve Karlin helps a young girl pick out a book for her dad. They land on The Windsors at War by Alexander Larman.

A self-diagnosed “book hoarder in recovery” from Connecticut peruses a big coffee table book on surfing.

“I’m just looking at everything,” Bill Kober says. “I often go in and have it in my mind that I want a certain book and end up walking out with something completely different. The true bookie likes to handle the texture of books, and I think there’s a little bit of a resurgence — that desire for people to have a place where they can do that.”

He says he saw the shop as he was getting ready to go watch his wife shop for clothes.

“It’s nice to have a bookstore I can sneak into and disappear,” he adds.

The book-loving Lenahan family from Florida wanders in after visiting family in Sag Harbor, at the behest of 8-year-old Avra. Her mom, Michele Lenahan, says, “We were walking and were ready to leave, everyone was tired, and she goes, ‘Oh can we please, please, please go in the bookstore?!’ and I was like, ‘I will never deny a request to go into a bookstore.’”

“Reading relaxes me,” says Avra, who read 300 books last summer and doesn’t like e-readers. “And sometimes I’ll write my own stories. I also really like to read National Geographic.”

On the other side, amid New Paperback Fiction — “I liked it, it really made me sad,” someone says about Marrying the Ketchups by Jennifer Close — New Paperback Non-Fiction, Classics, Poetry, Local Interest, Fishing & Boating, and Sci-Fi/Fantasy toward the back, several customers huddle around the popular Staff Suggestions section, which includes hand-written reviews under each book.

“I really like the recommendations,” says Sanjano Rao. “And just talking to people who work here who actually have read the books and know a lot about them. I like figuring out what should be my next read.”

Her friend, Swathi Krothapalli, who’s on a quest to reread books she read in high school, says, “Our friends wanted to go into town. They went to Prada. We are here.”

“I know I can’t afford anything there and I can afford this,” Rao chimes in.

Bartel understands feeling disconnected from one’s environment. Working paycheck to paycheck at an indie bookstore in an extremely wealthy community, he says, “You have to remember where we are. I’m sort of an outsider that’s inside, ingrained in this culture without even being part of it.” While recognizing buying books is still an “affluent habit,” he takes pride in BookHampton being one of the few stores in town that offers a product accessible to most.

As someone whose life depends on books, he feels lucky.

“If I’m having a hard day or something, it’s like being in my own library here,” he says.

For Bartel, reading people has always been hard. Books, though, were a different story. He struggled throughout his teenhood — he couldn’t apply himself at Westhampton Beach High School (except for English class), always feeling weird and out of step among the hierarchies and cliques, and he had real difficulty connecting with other humans. But in the libraries and bookstores his mother took him to, with a novel cracked open, he was always safe. Even though he was afraid to talk to booksellers.

From his early love for Star Wars novels and video game novelizations, he discovered Stephen King in high school. The horror scribe from Bangor, Maine fueled and expanded his voracity as a reader. In 2013, while studying creative writing at graduate school, he was hired at BookHampton in East Hampton — when it still had two other branches, in Southampton and Mattituck.

The final step in his application process was recommending three books in the store to its owner — The Count of Monte Cristo was one.

He started out in the basement, working in the shipping and receiving department, but his enthusiasm for books and talking about them with customers was wasted in the dark. He climbed up the ladder, er stairs, and became a bookseller. And despite being an introvert, the store helped him connect with people.

“At the end of the day, I can spend a good chunk of my time talking about something I like,” he says.

In 2015, when the East Hampton store was the last BookHampton standing and on its last legs, hurdling toward permanent closure, longtime summer resident, loyal shopper and book obsessive Carolyn Brody swooped in to save it: “I was like, ‘Oh my God, I cannot live in a village without a bookstore,’” Brody says over the phone.

She knew she had to make changes, but still stay true to what it was. The only one left from “the before times” was a boyish bookseller named Jesse (“We joked that I came with the place,” he says), whom she promoted to assistant manager and then full-time manager in 2018.

They gutted the store and renovations were made by Brody’s friend, Deborah Burke, dean and professor at the Yale School of Architecture. It became less cluttered, more open (bookshelves used to block the windows), more spacious to hold more books, brighter, cheerier. Brody strived to make it a more self-sustaining business: sales have increased every year since she took over.

“We’re a welcoming place, we’re a safe place, and we’re an accessible place,” Brody says. “You can come in and look at the books, you can get inspired, you can see friends, you can chat with the booksellers. Who doesn’t love a bookstore?” When it comes to Bartel, who has been the full-time manager since 2018, she says, “Jesse is really the face of the store. He’s the personality. BookHampton would not be the same without Jesse.”

Back in the store, customers prove Brody right.

“I love a small little bookshop. If this was a Barnes & Noble, I wouldn’t have come in,” says Kate Romm from Austin, Texas.

“Yeah, me neither,” says her 15-year-old daughter, Ayla, clutching Emily & The Six and Prep: A Novel. “And I’ve never read on a Kindle.”

Damiecki says, “You won’t find me shopping for any book on Amazon. I’m a big supporter of independent bookstores, so I will always come here. I don’t care if it’s impossible to park, I will get here. And Jesse and his team are the reason.”

Bartel recently added a new employee to his staff, a book fanatic he’s known in the store since she was 7. He remembers helping her pick out books and watching her passion for them grow.

“For me to be here as long as I have, I can see what kind of impact on the community I can make,” he says. “There’s gonna be one person I speak to and I can have an incredible effect on their reading habits. And I think, ‘Oh cool, this actually does really, really matter!’”

Asked what he has planned on his day off, the next day, Bartel says he is going to stay inside, order Uber Eats and read.