Greetings from Lincoln, Nebraska, where Gareth and I are paying a brief visit to my nonagenarian grandparents. Before coming here we spent a short time in Missouri, visiting my best friend, her husband and their two-and-a-half-year-old, and stumbling upon an independent bookstore in the historic city of Saint Charles, the second oldest city west of the Mississippi.

Main Street Books, formerly housed in a small school building, now occupies a cozy two-story brick space on a wonderfully preserved/restored Victorian street. I enjoyed browsing the store’s shelves, admiring their wonderful space, taking note of their unique book sections (e. g. Pioneering Women!) and talking with knowledgeable bookseller Betty Barro. But the thing that made me especially keen to feature this store was their clever use of one particular space — the kitchen in what was once an upstairs apartment. Rather than pulling out the cabinets and appliances as most stores would do, Main Street Books has left them in place and merchandised around, in or on them, creating a clever and unusual retail display space that works especially well for featuring (among other things) cookbooks! I took photos so you could see it for yourselves.

Below is a shot of the Main Street Books storefront, which faces a brick street that will soon be crawling with holiday carolers, Victorian Santas, and tourists galore. (The whole of Main Street gets into the holiday spirit during the annual "Christmas Traditions" celebration.)

As you enter the store and look toward the counter, your eye travels across two levels and up to the high, high ceilings that make the first floor seem bright and airy. I love that there’s so much to see but it doesn’t look cluttered. See the six steps on the right-hand side? You travel up those to get to the children’s section. To the left of what you see below is a steep wooden staircase that leads to the second floor.

Pictured below is the children’s section (board books, picture books, and non-fiction) on the raised level at the back of the first floor. The books’ bright colors stand out nicely against the exposed brick walls.

I love the idea of displaying books in the top lid of an old trunk, like the one in the photo below. What’s implied here is that each of these dinosaur books is a treasure!

It’s nice to see so many face-outs in the children’s non-fiction section:

The photo below gives me window envy. This is one was taken from the children’s section, looking toward the front of the store. Notice the staircase on the right.

Up the stairs we go, and head straight into the middle-grade section, where bean bag chairs offer shorter readers a place to relax:

If you turn your back on the middle-grade section and cut a bit to the left, you wind up with this view of the second floor, looking out at the street:

Turn your back to the street-facing view captured above, and voila! The store kitchen! Note the Christmas books that have been shelved (a bit haphazardly, as they’re probably coming in faster than they can be displayed!) in the kitchen cabinets. And, yes, that’s a stove on the far left. (There’s a refrigerator there too, but it didn’t fit within the frame of this photo.)

On the right, cookbooks:

In the center of the kitchen (and visible from the middle-grade section) is a nice face-out display of young adult books:

Heading back downstairs:

And here’s a nice parting shot of the front of the store, taken while peering over the stairway railing and waving goodbye to Betty, at the front counter below:

Thanks, Main Street Books, for a great visit and some creative inspiration!