Ye Olde Warwick Book Shoppe to Open Second Location

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In the coming weeks, the owners of Warwick, New York’s Ye Olde Warwick Book Shoppe will open a second store with a Victorian-era aesthetic in nearby Greenwood Lake.


Ye Olde Warwick Book Shoppe prepares to open in Greenwood Lake, New York.

“The façade of this new store is a very charming Swiss chalet, so a lot of the same elements that we have in the Warwick shop can also be in the new store,” said Thomas G. Roberts, the business’ co-owner with his partner, Joseph J. Justin.

The new location’s architectural design elements will include brass lighting fixtures, dark wood, and green glass shades. “I’m also having custom-stained bookshelves made, and I’m putting in ceiling beams, so it will have a similar feel to the Warwick store,” said Roberts, who recently learned that the three-year-old Warwick store had won the Times Herald-Record People’s Choice Award for “Best Book Store” in the Hudson Valley for the second year in a row.

Roberts and Justin are planning an August 1 soft opening for the second Ye Old Warwick Book Shoppe and, if everything goes according to plan, the grand opening celebration will be one to two weeks later.

“We’re taking on [opening a second location] mainly because the store [in the Village of Warwick] has just been very, very successful. Our sales keep bounding up each quarter, many times in the double-digit percentages,” Roberts said, adding that there was a real need in the area for a bookstore.We’re the only independent bookstore in Orange County, and that’s sad to say, but on the other hand, it’s nice for me because I don’t have any competition.”

The new store, which is 20 minutes away from the flagship location (both are within the Town of Warwick), boasts a 1,500-square-foot selling floor and a comparatively larger recreation and sports section highlighting lake activities and the Appalachian Trail, which runs through the rustic resort community of Greenwood Lake.

The store in Greenwood Lake will also feature a large “Kiddie Korner,” a section recently added to the Warwick store.

“Our Kiddie Korner in the Warwick store is a little on the small side, but it’s a lot more than I used to have. It has been enormously successful, so the store in Greenwood Lake is going to have a much bigger Kiddie Korner,” Roberts said. “One of the nice things about the additional space is that I am going to be able to do more programming like story times, which I can’t really do in the Warwick store since it’s too small.”

Among other programs Roberts and Justin are planning are a poetry night, regular events with local authors, and book signings. Maria Stasolla, who until now has worked as a salesperson at the Warwick shop, will manage operations at the second location, and Roberts plans to stop by a few times a week to see how things are going.

The majority of the Greenwood Lake store’s stock will be new books, Roberts said, in addition to used books. Non-book inventory will include greeting cards and book-related merchandise, coffee mugs, bookmarks, socks, and unusual items that can’t be found online, Roberts said. Missing from the inventory will be the rare or leather-bound books sold at the Warwick location.

That the Village of Greenwood Lake did not already have a bookstore surprised Roberts, because, like the rest of the Town of Warwick, its population is very much involved in the arts, he said.

“I just feel that there is a great need in the community here: a hunger for real, live books,” Roberts said. “I just couldn’t imagine them not having a bookstore, with all the cultural interests this community has, so that’s basically what’s inspiring me in this.”

“I think bookstores are very necessary to complete what I like to call the ‘tapestry of the community,’” he added.

Going forward, Roberts said, he will make sure the Greenwood Lake store is as involved in community partnerships as the Warwick store is. This year, Ye Olde Warwick Book Shoppe is helping out the local library by supplying books for the town’s children’s book festival, which will feature more than 50 authors. The store is also co-sponsoring a reading project that places copies of Paper Towns by John Green (Speak) in cafés around town to be read, discussed, and returned.