Don Lindgren has leased a retail space at The Black Box on Washington Ave which will become a temporary retail shop for his acclaimed culinary bookstore Rabelais Books (website, facebook, instagram) during the months of July, August and September.
The shop will feature a mixture of food and drink-related books, ephemera, and artifacts, mixing new and recent publications with old and rare cookbooks, recipe manuscripts, and culinary ephemera.
Once a behemoth of a cookbook shop in Biddeford’s North Dam Mill, the tiny container space will be a cabinet of curiosities, featuring a mixture of food and drink-related books, ephemera, and artifacts. Mixing new and recent publications with old and rare cookbooks, recipe manuscripts, and culinary ephemera, we expect a visit to Rabelais’ tiny space to make a gargantuan impact on what you think about cookbooks, or food writing, or culinary history.
Lindgren plans to launch this pocket-sized Rabelais on the July 4th weekend. The regular hours of operation will be Wednesday through Monday, 11 am to 7 pm. It will be located in the space immediately to the right of Moonday Coffee.
Rabelais was named to the Saveur 100 list of their favorite foods, people, places, and things, was called the “Best Cookbook Shop in America” by Andrew Knowlton in Bon Appetite, and was featured in the Maine episode of the show of Somebody Feed Phil. Launched in 2007 in the storefront that’s now home to Eventide on Middle Street, Rabelais was in the city to witness and participate in its rise as a culinary destination. In 2012 the bookshop moved to Biddeford. Lindgren closed the Biddeford store in September 2023 and since then has operated Rabelais as a virtual business.
Lindgren has spent an active life in the book trade. He has served on the Board of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of American, was a presenter at the Oxford Food Symposium in 2017 and in 2019, and was named a Literary Lion in the 2023 Readable Feast honors program. He was a contributing author to the Maine Community Cookbooks and currently serves as a Board member of Community Plate, an organization dedicated to facilitating connection and building community through a common language of food, shared food stories and recipes.