White Birch Books - North Conway, New Hampshire

When you pass into the White Mountain Woods, just beyond North Conway, the welcome sign informs that the state forest is "a land of many uses." At first, it seems that they must have struggled to come up with anything better. But on a second look, it's just accurate.

The Mount Washington Valley is a landscape of mountains and old farm houses. Old houses turned into restaurants. Old houses turned into offices. Old houses turned into tattoo parlors. It is a land of many uses, and reuses. 

There is another old house, a turreted Victorian affair with a vast farmer's porch, that for the last twenty-five years has housed White Birch Books. Nestled among trees, against the backdrop of the White Mountains, White Birch Books is the fairy tale candy cottage hidden in the forest—except no one gets eaten there. 

  Up the path, across the porch, into a purple octagonal foyer bedecked with posters and flyers, through a beautiful stained-glass door. The first floor of the store is a sprawling living room where recommendations abound. There is a four-sided rec case just through the door, rec displays throughout the store, and little recommendation tags among the shelves. 

Another thing this store does very right is their children's section. Almost the entirety of the second floor, complete with a sliding bookshelf ladder, is dedicated to middle grade and children's literature. There was a display of picture books dedicated to strong girls and women, and a great variety of other books besides. I overheard several conversations that warmed my heart of children negotiating book purchases with their parents. One boy, aged probably about ten or eleven, was trying to convince his father that all eight of the books he had picked out were imperative to have. A girl aged about fourteen tried, unsuccessfully, to get her mother to purchase a coffee-table-book sized illustrated edition of Moby Dick. 

Literature is wonderful, but as a reader and bookshop patron, it's all about genre. White Birch's SFF selection is quite small, though there are a number of genre-line dancers shelved among the literary fiction. The games section was. better stocked.


Don't go looking for your next fantasy pick there, but White Birch Bookstore is a fantastic spot well worth the visit.