McIntyre’s Books is one of those bookstores that’s impossible to leave empty-handed. Owner Keebe Fitch likes to say that even sales reps—people with access to as many free books as they can read—who visit her store wind up buying books. It’s situated in a bucolic village near Chapel Hill, North Carolina, called Fearrington—also the site of the Fearrington House Country Inn, a Relais & Chateau property that’s one of the area’s finest hotels.
In 1974, Fitch’s parents bought Fearrington, which was then just a farm. They built a community around the farm, which now encompasses quiet neighborhoods of well-kept homes, a village center with cafes and shops, and, of course, the beautiful rolling countryside—home to the locally famous belted Galloway cows.
Fitch opened McIntyre’s Books 21 years ago, drawing heavily on the mentoring she received from Erica Eisdorfer of the Bull’s Head Bookshop at the University of North Carolina. McIntyre’s is named after Fitch’s grandmother. The shop sells a range of books, but has a booming cookbook section. Fitch’s mother, Jenny Fitch, wrote The Fearrington House Cookbook, and was quite a cook herself. Fitch still has her mother’s cookbook collection, which is peppered with handwritten notes that advise adjusting ingredient quantities and other tidbits. Fitch enjoys cooking from those books; “It’s almost like she’s talking to me,” she says.
Here, Fitch talks to PW about what's selling, what's not, and who's buying.
What are your biggest categories?
Mystery’s big. We have a good demand for kids’ books, and we sell a lot of fiction. We try to sell nonfiction, if we can handsell it, but as a general rule it’s not as good for us as fiction is. Our gardening section has shrunk, but cookbooks have blown up.
Do you have any sense of how e-books have cut into your sales?
Yes, a customer will come in and you’ll get excited talking to them about a book, and they’ll say, ‘Oh, thanks! Do you have a piece of paper? I’m going to write it down and buy it for my Kindle.’ But what are you going to do? If they’re wedded to their Kindle, they’re wedded to their Kindle.
Who are your customers?
We get a lot of retired people, as well as young families. People come to walk around and look at the gardens. We’ve also had some famous literary regulars. Former Wall Street Journal book reviewer Edmund Fuller lived at Fearrington. He told me if you’re going to be a reader, it’s not how much you can read in your lifetime—the real reader goes back to a book again and again and reflects on it at certain points in your life. And Herb Bailey, former director of Princeton University Press, also retired at Fearrington.
You have a lot of author events.
We sure do. Recent [big names have included] Giada DeLaurentiis, Tricia Yearwood, and Paula Deen. We can hold 80 people in the bookstore, and we have a barn where we can hold 700 people standing, or 300 seated. We hope to do more cookbook events. We did a really successful one last year with Steven Raichlen where he gave a barbecue class, a dinner, and everyone got his new book.
