Hampshire Bookshop

THE HAMPSHIRE BOOKSHOP, founded in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1916 by two Smith College alumnae, Marion Elza Dodd ’06 (1882–1961) and Mary Byers Smith ’08 (1886–1983), was called by Robert Frost “one of the few bookshops in the world where books are sold in something like the spirit they were written in.” Over the course of its fifty-five-year history the Bookshop served the Northampton commun

ity and Smith and other local colleges, but more importantly brought to the region more than one hundred writers of national and international repute (including Frost, William Butler Yeats, Carl Sandburg, Amy Lowell, Hugh Lofting, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Thornton Wilder, Archibald MacLeish, Padraic Colum, James Stephens, Edna St. It was one of the earliest of the “personal bookshops” of the early twentieth century and the first cooperative bookshop associated with a woman’s college. It also published more than forty titles over its own imprint (local natural histories, books related to Bookshop lectures, pamphlet publications of Smith lectures, a bibliography of Emily Dickinson). The Hampshire Bookshop device incorporated a sailing ship and Dickinson’s line, “There is no frigate like a book.”