Provincetown Bookshop
Image courtesy of the store.
46 Commercial Street in Provincetown, Massachusetts houses the Port-Hole Building, an extension of Captain Philip Cook’s house built around 1850. Since 1939, the building has also played home to Provincetown Bookshop, the oldest independent bookstore in town. The store is only slightly larger than my Manhattan studio apartment, made up of white walls and wooden shelves from an era when books were smaller. You have to navigate with care around awkwardly placed stairs and narrow pathways to get from the Cape Cod history books and the LGBTQ writers at the store’s front to the mysteries and classics at the back.
“It’s very, very old school, very idiosyncratic,” says Manager Deborah Karacozian, who moved to Provincetown from Boston in 1990 and has worked at the shop for the past nine years. “I think of it as a browser’s paradise. You can spend a lot of time there and come up with some amazing books. You can also walk in and within five minutes get something to read at the beach, a best-seller, or a staff recommendation. I would say it’s one of the last dastards of funk in Provincetown.”
Image courtesy of the store.
It’s been one of my absolute favorite bookshops since I was a kid, hence the heartbreak I felt when discovering last month that it was up for sale and, without a buyer, at risk of closing.
Provincetown Bookshop was originally opened by Paul Smith and his wife Isabel “Bunny” Smith—who purchased the property from Capt. Cook 7 years after opening the bookshop further down on the same street. Joel Newman and Elloyd Hanson—a retired Columbia University music history professor and the editor of The American Recorder, respectively—took ownership of the business in 1963. The life partners spent the rest of their days building up Provincetown Bookshop, during which time the store hosted John Waters as an employee, Norman Mailer as a customer, and a make-out session between Faye Dunaway and Peter Wolf.
Joel and Elloyd in the Bookshop. Photo credit: Philip Swayze.
Newman’s nephew Philip Swayze has been handling the bookshop’s finances since his uncle passed in 2014. “I think there was a lot of meaning for me in keeping the bookshop running,” he says, “to continue to offer it to the community and keep jobs in place. Those were things that resonated for me and for my relatives.” In taking over the business, Swayze also discovered just how much his uncles put into the store—from Hanson’s cheesy sale signs featuring Greek beheading portraits (“People are losing their heads over these deals”) to Newman frequently forgoing his salary to buy advertisements in the local newspaper and fund the annual winter lighting of the Pilgrim Monument. “The uncles, as we referred to them, they loved that bookshop,” Swayze said. “It was really their labor of love to keep it running.”
However, for all of its delightful quirks, the bookshop suffered technologically. “If you’ve been to the store, you know that for years you bought a book and everything would get written down in a little notebook, because we weren’t automated,” Karacozian says. “Running out of ink was the worst thing that could happen.” Swayze modernized the computing system, and gave Karacozian and Nan Cinnater (fellow bookseller/former manager of the bookstore Now Voyager) the freedom to expand the store’s offerings with notecards, tote bags, booklights, and even more books. “I like to think we have the books that everybody wants, the books that everybody’s reading, and the books that we think you should read, as well as some strange things that have lingered over the years,” Karacozian adds. “Every year when we clean, I swear we find books from Joel and Elloyd’s time that I’ve never seen before.”
Joel and Philip Swayze. Photo credit: Philip Swayze
Karacozian also loves interacting with customers—those looking for something they heard about on NPR, or even the people who can only remember small cover details. “If it looks like a really cool person, we’ll say something like, ‘Oh, you mean the book with the pages?’” she jokes. Her favorites are those looking to switch from reading on a Kindle to print, as well as folks who return to thank the booksellers for recommendations. “It’s priceless.”
However, Provincetown Bookshop has long suffered from understaffing (in part due to Provincetown having little to no affordable housing options), and things have only grown busier. With COVID restrictions, the bookshop is only allowed 8 people at a time, sometimes leading to a line down the street to get in. “Last year was the first time many people had been in a bookstore in months, and now it’s the first time people have been into a bookstore in over a year,” Karacozian says.
Image courtesy of the store.
Swayze has bittersweet feelings about the bookshop’s potential closure. He has fond memories of going there as a child with his mother for Thanksgiving and being allowed to pick out any book he wanted. After Hanson’s passing in 2007 and Swayze’s divorce in 2008, he and Newman both found themselves with extra time on their hands—spending a lot of it together in the bookshop and the apartment attached, where Newman lived. “I have this memory of going out to dinner in the winter, and every time we came home, Uncle Joel always wanted to go through the bookshop, and how he had to fumble with a big old ring of keys to open the door,” Swayze recalls. “It was such a hassle, but it was something he wanted to do, and it’s a little thing that’s stuck with me.”
The asking price for the Provincetown Bookshop brand and equipment is $50,000, as well as the inventory at cost. Swayze’s hope is that a “kind and benevolent soul who loves books,” and lives in town, will be willing to purchase and relocate the business. “It captures the spirit of Provincetown,” he says. “The brand just wouldn’t work so well outside of there. It’s like California Pizza Kitchen on the streets of New York.”
Alison Bechdel at Provincetown Bookshop. Image courtesy of the store.
“I love the store and I have a hard time imagining it not being a part of my life,” Karazonian says. Since the bookshop is currently slated to only stay open through Labor Day, she’s been trying not to drool over too many of the upcoming fall titles, instead taking everything day by day. “I tell people I’m going to be optimistic even if I have to hurt someone,” she says. “Eighty-nine years is such a long time to be a part of a town, so I would hate to see that disappear. It’s a wonderful piece of old Provincetown that’s also 100% current with the changes that have happened.” Her hope remains that she will be able to see it through to 100. “Then I can inch on in with my walker and go, ‘Yay!’”
Recommendations from the Booksellers
Karacozian’s latest selections include The Narrow Land by Christine Dwyer Hickey, a story of two boys who spend a 1950s summer in Cape Cod with the company of a fraught artistic couple—as well as Lily King’s latest bestseller, Writers & Lovers. The latter follows Casey Peabody in the summer of 1997, where she spends her days waitressing in Harvard Square and her evenings trying to pen a novel, while pondering what it means to try to live a creative life. Fun fact: the restaurant where Casey works—The Pudding—also once employed both Karacozian and King.
The shop's resident mystery fan, Cinnater, recommended The Secrets We Kept by Laura Prescott, a historical thriller about a Russian-American secretary selected from the CIA and assigned to help smuggle the banned Doctor Zhivago into the USSR. She is also a big fan of crime writer Deborah Crombie, who's latest in the Duncan Kincaid-Gemma James series, A Bitter Feast, finds the couple and their children on a relaxing weekend in Britain’s Cotswolds as guests at Beck House, the family estate of Gemma’s detective sergeant. The holiday looks to be good fun, but following a tragic car accident and a series of strange deaths, Duncan and Gemma find themselves pulled into an investigation and looking to the past for answers.
Andrea Lawlor at Provincetown Bookshop. Image courtesy of Provincetown Bookshop.
Last year, bookseller Clayton Nottleman was encouraging customers to check out The Butterfly Garden by Dot Hutchinson, a psychological thriller that follows a group of young women referred to as “butterflies”—who have been kidnapped, tattooed with their namesake, and kept in a garden—and their discovery, leaving FBI agents to piece the mystery together. His pick this year is Andrea Lawlor’s Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl. Adored by Maggie Nelson and Eileen Myles, the novel follows shapeshifter Paul Polydoris through the early 90s as he navigates Riot Grrrl music, leather clubs, and zine culture, while being able to shift his body and gender at a whim. Lawlor is a fan of The Provincetown Bookshop, too, having recently stopped by to sign some copies.
