White Square Fine Books & Art is nestled in the town of Easthampton, Mass., deep in the heart of the Pioneer Valley. Eileen Corbeil and her husband purchased a beautiful old building at 86 Cottage Street in April 2010, and spent nine months renovating the space, opening the store in December 2010. The name White Square is borrowed from La Place Blanche, one of the small plazas along the Boulevard de Clichy in Paris, where, in the early 1900s, clouds of chalky dust were churned up by carts carrying plaster of Paris and where Degas, Picasso and other artists lived and worked.
Why did you open a bookstore in the Pioneer Valley?
Eileen: We needed a place to shelve and organize the thousands of books that filled our home and were making the floor joists sag! Though we also hoped to encourage reading and a love for books, and add a literary dimension to our artistic and musical hometown.
What’s your favorite section in the store?
No easy answer since I love stocking the shelves and working the counter, greeting regulars or meeting new people, especially children. Perhaps because it happens too infrequently, I love working quietly in the basement where our rare and collectible books are housed and where I can (without interruption) do research on inscriptions, signatures, first editions, etc.
If you had infinite space what would you add?
I would expand in three areas: (1) more and better space to display rare books and host interesting exhibitions; (2) more and better space for children, including a welcoming and fun event space; and (3) space to offer the occasional high tea like you might find in Cornwall and Devon.
What do you do better than any other bookstore?
We do great events with authors and artists. At our annual Bloomsday lunch we’ll read and discuss a portion of Ulysses and enjoy a light Leopold Bloom-type lunch. We sponsored Easthampton’s first Book Festival in April on a shoestring budget and attracted more than 1,000 people to the 20 or so events. Plus, I have a knack for finding cool and collectible items of interest to bibliophiles (see the Americana catalog).
What’s the oddest situation you’ve ever had to deal with in the store?
Customers (and their dogs) have always been great!
What’s your earliest/best memory about visiting a bookstore as a child?
I grew up in rural Vermont where there were no bookstores. We relied on the regional lending library, which deposited books in our neighbor Stella’s dining room once a month. I adored choosing and checking out books, especially because Stella was a great cook and usually offered me a homemade donut.
If you weren’t running/working at a bookstore what would you be doing?
I’d still be working in a senior management position in higher education. And wishing I were running a bookstore…
What’s been the biggest surprise about running a bookstore?
I opened the bookstore because it seemed like it would be fun for me (and it is). But I’ve learned that bookstores are integral to the intellectual life of a community, and filling this need (and being able to sustain the effort) has been incredibly rewarding.
The staff shelf
What is Eileen reading?
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The Hill Bachelors by William Trevor (2000). “My favorite piece of writing by William Trevor is The Hill Bachelors, one of a dozen stories in the collection of the same name. Paulie, the unmarried son of an Irish farmer, returns home to take care of his mother and the dying farm after his father’s death. Over the course of this 22-page story he loses his fiancé (“Jeez! What would I do on a farm?”) and becomes on of the many bachelor hidden among the hills of western Ireland: ‘Enduring, unchanging, the hills had waited for him, claiming one of their own.’ Each time I read this story I discover new subtleties and feel more empathy. It’s masterful.”
- Daughter of the East by Benazir Bhutto (1988). “Benazir Bhutto inscribed her 1988 autobiography to Senator Claiborne Pell, who had worked to secure Bhutto’s release from prison in the early 1980’s. Given that she spent so much time in detention and under tight security, books signed by Bhutto are quite rare. Her lovely inscription to the intrepid, eccentric, and long-serving Rhode Island senator makes this a very special book.”
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The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses by Kevin Birmingham (2014). “Sylvia Beach has been my idol for many years, so it meant a great deal that when The Most Dangerous Book was published last summer, Kevin agreed to travel nearly 200 round-trip miles from Cambridge for an author event at White Square. This mix of literary biography and cultural history offers still-relevant cautions about the peril of censorship and the hypocrisy of moral bullies.”
