Effective January 2015, Carol B. Chittenden is selling Eight Cousins Bookstore, Falmouth, Mass., to local residents Sara M. Hines, Mary Fran Buckley and Eileen Miskell. Hines currently manages the store's digital media, programming and on-site events; Buckley has worked at the store in a variety of areas, including finance, book clubs and adult fiction buying; and Miskell has a background in business management and serves on the board of Independent Bank, parent of Rockland Trust, and the Cape Cod Foundation. She is the co-owner, with her husband, of Wood Lumber Company in Falmouth.
Chittenden founded Eight Cousins, with her mother, Betty Borg, in 1986. "My mother asked if I could give her one year to help get the store up and running," Chittenden said. "And here I am, 28 years later." Chittenden, who is a co-founder of the New England Children's Booksellers Advisory Council, part of the New England Independent Booksellers Association, added, "Falmouth has the economic and intellectual vigor to support an independent bookstore, and there has been no greater honor to me than owning that store. However, it's grown too big for one person--a person who's now 28 years older--to handle alone. The buyers are a Dream Team if ever there was one."
Eight Cousins began as a children's bookstore, but when other bookstores in Falmouth closed, it added adult books. In 2002, Eight Cousins won the Women's National Book Association's Pannell Award. In 2009 and 2014, Eight Cousins was cited by Yankee magazine as the Best Children's Bookstore in New England.
For many years, Sara Hines joined her family at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Falmouth during the summers, and starting in college, she worked at Eight Cousins in summer. In 2013, Hines was awarded a doctorate in English Literature and Book History from the University of Edinburgh. She has worked as an assistant to the children's editor at Kirkus Reviews and as a bookseller at a range of general and children's bookstores in the U.S. and the U.K. She has worked full-time at Eight Cousins since 2012.
Mary Fran Buckley moved to Falmouth and joined Eight Cousins in 2007. She has some 20 years of experience as a magazine editor and served as the director of communications for a private high school in Washington, D.C.
