Emily Baker, of Willis Monie Books: on what it takes to run a longstanding bookstore, and what she loves about it.
Emily Baker, the owner of Willis Monie Books in Cooperstown, New York, estimates that she has about 500,000 items in the bookstore. 127,000 of those are catalogued and available to purchase online. These numbers do not even account for duplicates, of which the store has many.
“We have at least one employee whose sole job, 32 hours a week, is to enter books into the catalogue,” Baker told me. The sheer number of books in their collection is impressive enough, but the fact that this bookstore has been around for nearly 40 years is truly impressive.
Baker is a Cooperstown native, and started working at Willis Monie Books when she was 15, and just never left. “I did go to college for a semester, but I decided this is kind of what I wanted to do. Why have all of those school bills when this is what I want?” Since July of this year, Baker is now the official owner of the store.
Willis Monie Books was opened by Willis Monie, Sr. in 1979, and it originally ran out of his house. In 1989, Monie Sr. bought the space in which the bookstore still resides, and in 2000, Willis Monie, Jr. joined the team. He ran the store until 2025, when he retired. Soon after, Baker became the owner.
Willis Monie Books, a member of the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America, has become a staple business in downtown Cooperstown. “We have our regulars for sure,” says Baker. “I also know people I grew up with that have lived here their whole life, and they'll be like, ‘I didn't know there even was a bookstore in Cooperstown.’” Nonetheless, the bookstore has a consistent customer base year-round, which is in part why the store has stayed open for as long as it has.
Being in Cooperstown, the bookstore carries a lot of baseball material, and according to Baker, the summer months are marked with people coming into the store looking for baseball-related items. However, during the winter months, mot of their business shifts to online sales and those sales are not usually related to baseball. “We just had a call the other day for occult books, and then a couple months ago, we had a call for super strict religious books. It really is a spectrum, and we buy it all.”
Although Baker admits that running a bookstore is a lot harder than it looks (a lot of reported schlepping of books into the store and constant cataloguing), she loves the work she does. “Buying a box of books and then going through the books that I've bought– It's like opening a treasure chest,” says Baker. “I also love buying books with certain customers in mind. I love seeing a book and thinking, "Oh, Jason's gonna love that book. I'm gonna get that book for him," and then he's excited when he comes in and buys it.”
She also attributes the long history and success of this bookstore to the dedication of its employees, and its dedicated customer base of regulars. “We have one employee that has been here for longer than I've been alive, and I think he's really helped. We also have our regulars, the people that come in after lunch or before dinner who would prefer to buy a used copy from us rather than a used copy from Amazon.”
Willis Monie Books will be joining us at the Northampton Book Fair for the first time, and will be bringing an extensive collection of baseball material, Massachusetts history books, binders of ephemera and many other items. Avoid the lines at the door, don’t forget to buy tickets if you haven’t already, and we hope to see you Friday, November 20th, 5-8pm and Saturday, November 21st, 10am - 4pm at the Northampton Community Arts Trust, 33 Hawley Street.
Written by Francisco Aguirre-Ghiso, November 5, 2026
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