 |
|
| Chris Abouzeid and Kathy Crowley | |
Belmont Books will open next March at 79 Leonard Street in Belmont, Mass. The co-owners are Chris Abouzeid and Kathy Crowley ("Your friendly neighborhood booksellers"), who broke the news yesterday that they have signed a lease: "We wish this was a grand opening announcement, but that's still a few months in the future. We're ready to answer one of your biggest questions, though: Where the heck is our store going to be?... If you know Belmont, that's right in the middle of the soon-to-be-renovated Macy's building, in that quaint section with the white façade and lovely molding that just screams 'Put an awesome store in here!' "
Belmont Books will occupy the ground and second floors of the building ("So when you're looking at the building, those big, wide windows up above? Those are ours. Can you say 'reading room with a view?' "). These FAQs provide further details.
A bookseller at Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Mass., Abouzeid has worked as a magazine editor, production manager, programmer, web consultant and IT director. He is the author of Anatopsis, a YA fantasy novel. Crowley is a physician at Boston Medical Center and an assistant professor of medicine at the Boston University School of Medicine, as well as an author who is "currently racing to finish her second novel, a spy mystery set in the local area, before her bookstore responsibilities take away all her free time."
An "About Us" page on the Belmont Books website poses the key question: "Why open a bookstore?" Their answer: "Because every town needs one. Both of us have fond memories of going to the local bookstore when we were young, feeling the excitement of being allowed to pick out one (maybe even two or three) books, racing home to read whatever new Roald Dahl or Judy Blume or Lloyd Alexander title we'd found.
"Later, as adults living in Cambridge and Somerville, we were blessed to be in an area full of great bookstores: Harvard Bookstore, Brookline Booksmith, Wordsworth, Newtonville Books and--most especially--Porter Square Books.... Sadly, when we moved to Belmont, the local bookstore had closed only a year or two before.... For months, every time we walked through our town center, we would look at the banks and restaurants, gift shops, ice cream parlor, and we would say to each other, 'There should be a bookstore here.' And so we finally decided to make it happen. It's been a long road to reach this point, but with any luck, we'll be open for business sometime in early 2017. We hope to see you then!"