Rabelais has announced plans to move their bookstore to Biddeford early next year. Biddeford’s gain will be a real loss to the Portland food scene.
Here are details from the Rabelais email newsletter:
Change is afoot. If you’ve been in the store any time in the last year or two you have noticed all the boxes cluttering the store. Rabelais’ collection of Antiquarian Books has increased at a pace that has outgrown our current space. So in the New Year Rabelais will be moving to a larger space. We are so excited about our new location. It has been all we can do to keep it a secret this long. Rabelais’ new home will be a loft in the North Dam Mills in Biddeford. Our new digs will accompany a slight change in the ways of Rabelais. The focus of the business will shift predominantly to rare books, imports, and really special American releases. We’ll finally have enough shelf space for most of our books, and we will be building a test kitchen in which to cook from the tens of thousands of recipes in our collection. As soon as we have made some progress on the new space, pictures will go up on the blog/website. Fear not! We will be at 86 Middle Street through the holidays and a bit beyond, so we hope to be your source for holiday gifts again this year.
See Vrai-lean-uh for her perspective on the move.
For additional reporting see the Press Herald and the Portland Daily Sun.
“The focus of the business will shift predominantly to rare books, imports, and really special American releases. ”
I suspect this is the only way for a small bookstore to survive in the age of Amazon.com
Not true at all. Longfellow Books in the same city is doing very well through a combination of a hard working staff and lots of customers who believe that a local bookstore is worth supporting.
All small bookstores are different so you cannot judge the success or failure of one bookstore by what happens or is happening to another bookstore.
I wish Rabelias well in its new incarnation and I’ll miss their presence in this city.