Editor’s note: Updated, March 1, 2026; originally published Feb. 16, 2026 when the future looked different.

A chapter in the book that is Whitlock’s Book Barn in Bethany, Connecticut, is closing. A new epoch will (not) begin.

I do know.

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— Moo Dog Press (@moodogpress.com) February 16, 2026 at 10:24 AM

The annual book sale has just passed, but it was pretty wonderful to see flocks of fellow readers, collectors in Bethany, Connecticut. To hear their greetings, see smiles of those walking in or leaving with bags full of books they selected–joy.

Books. Time. Silence. Paradise.

Originally, the upper barn was for sheep, the lower one for turkeys.

Across the road, was the Whitlock farmhouse, barns, with more than 100 acres (now privately owned).

Changes over the years.

Now Meg Turner is retiring.

From the book store’s recent special edition e-mail (you, too, can subscribe):

Hi Everyone. Meg Turner here.

I wanted to let you all know that I am retiring. My last day will be February 22. I can’t tell you how much I have enjoyed working here and getting to meet many of you. I will certainly miss this community of book lovers. If you want to know what I will be doing, for the foreseeable future, the answer is nothing! I have visions of sitting in my comfortable chair with a big cup of coffee reading War and Peace!

(And there’s now eBay and Amazon storefronts.)

Want to learn more? There’s reams of history/reporting, stories (dating back to 1960) on the official site: https://whitlocksbookbarn.com/?page_id=22. Start there. Or just go and browse. (Not on a Monday or Tuesday.)

Our 2017 story of his acquisition of Whitlock’s (it’s been years) has been archived, but still resonates.

Here’s is an excerpt (written almost 10 years ago):

“I’ve loved books since I was a kid and I grew up with nothing. Basically my father abandoned my mother and I when I was a kid, we struggled and I remember in school they would give us these Scholastic Press books, all the kids with money could order what they wanted. I would always just circle things and never get them, but I love to read, always have. I live about a mile and a half from the book store it went on the market, the book store did, and I hate to see book stores fail…”

“Our house looks pretty much like the shop. I love to read, that’s probably my first mistake, a reader buying a book store is like a drunk buying a liquor store. I call it the five finger discount.

“Books represent to me a doorway into another world, a world anything is possible. Where imagination is king…

So Set Yourself Free (the sign) is an invitation to come in and set yourself free with a book. The first thing I did right after we closed on the book store was go to a local sign maker and got a couple to put over our door.

“The land owner used part of the Whitlock barn and lived across street from here. They began selling books in New Haven in the 1890s, and I have learned from talking to people that two of the sons of the original owner developed an in estate interest sales.”

Here’s a bit more (again, the original interview, photo session and MDP story):

“So the trick in buying books from an estate is to think there are two or three things I want in there but I just can’t buy those. the family wants to get rid of all three or four thousand of the books, so you buy the whole lot and take what you want. They were storing the remainder here at Whitlock’s and after they had thirty or forty thousand in the upper barn and started selling them. So they put a can in the corner for the cash on the honor system. A cash register followed shortly after, and the store has been open ever since…we purchased the property in March of 2005.

“Our stock rolls with the market and what I mean by that we specialize in the remains of scholarly estates. So what will happen typically is a professor somewhere will die and his
estate will go his library or his wife’s library and they donate the best books to a university, much to our chagrin. And we get the remainder…”

“You’ll never know what you’ll find here.”

“…this is a readers’ shop.”

“We are standing on the first floor of the old sheep barn, but on the second floor we have maps and prints and that is an interesting story. In the Depression, it was difficult sometimes to heat the Whitlock farm and at some point they ended up with a collection of Beers Atlases. These were hand-drawn maps of various counties from mid-Maine down to northern Virginia and down into eastern Pennsylvania. The Whitlock family were taking the covers off and using them for heat.”

More from Bethany Historical Society:

The History of Whitlock’s Bookstore, by Jane Garry

“…There are only a few people left in the area who remember the man who began the bookstore that would give rise to the Book Barn. ‘Old C.E.H.’ is how the late Thelma Lumpkin, who lived a few houses up the road, referred to him when she spoke of the old days. She was over 90 when we talked about him; he had been dead about forty years.

“The history of Whitlock’s bookstore incarnations begins well over a century ago in New Haven with the Reverend William H. Kingsbury. Kingsbury, ordained but not a practicing minister, owned a large secondhand bookstore on Crown Street called Reeve’s which served the Yale community. An alumnus of Brown and a great chess enthusiast, he was known to shutter his shop of an afternoon if a professor friend dropped by for a game.

“In the closing years of the nineteenth century his great-nephew Clifford Everett Hale Whitlock came up from Fairfield County after the death of his father, a schoolmaster. By all accounts the Reverend Kingsbury was a generous, kind man. He never married or had children, and he took Clifford, no more than 12 at the time, under his wing and enrolled him in a prep school on Chapel Street. This was his first gift. Another was the opportunity to work in the bookshop, and there Clifford found his life’s calling. In an interview decades later Clifford recalled how a student had pointed out the course digests, tailored to specific classes at Yale, and offered to recruit fellow students to write more of them. Clifford knew instantly that they would be popular and lucrative.

“Within a few years Kingsbury bought a secondhand book and coin shop run by one F. R. Andrews at 66 High Street, also the location of Yale bicycle storage. A few years later Clifford’s uncle retired and he may have given or sold his inventory to Clifford. It became the first Whitlock’s Book Store. Clifford was remarkably young at the time. Perhaps bookselling was in his blood; family lore has it that a Whitlock ancestor kept a bookshop in New York as early as 1820. In October 1907 William Kingsbury died, and his obituary stated that he was “known to Yale men the country over.” His store had functioned as the college bookstore for Yale, and Whitlock’s would carry on that tradition.”

To read more, the story continues at Bethany Historical Society’s site, linked here.

A footnote. While looking for one thing, got lost this past summer–which resulted in the happiest sort of not finding (until later) the destination sought. Why? Because the resting place of Gilbert Hale Whitlock (and family) was found by chance instead. Coincidence? I think not.

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“For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”