Love rare, out-of-print children’s books? E.M Maurice Books does too!
“I’ve always been enamored by old books,” said Timothy Forry, owner of E.M Maurice Books, an online bookstore that specializes in rare and out-of-print children’s books. “I went to the New York Antiquarian Book Fair once, just when I first started buying books for myself, and I looked around, and I was kind of like, "This feels like home. It felt like that's where I should be.”
A graduate of Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, Forry started out as a book scout, and then turned to bookselling. He started his business in 2003 in Dobbs Ferry, New York, and a year later, moved to Litchfield, Connecticut, where he opened an appointment-only bookstore, which ran from 2007 to 2015. He transitioned fully to an online bookstore in 2015, and has continually operated a meticulously organized website for close to a decade now.
Forry started out as a general antiquarian seller, but he is also an author and artist on the side, and he felt children’s books “marry those two things very well,” which led him to focus on that as his specialization. He intends to branch out in the near future into other types of illustrated books, mainly ones that focus on design and architecture.
Although Forry’s catalog is wide-ranging and varies quite a bit, there are a few selling trends that he follows.
Books that have won the Caldecott or Newbery Medals, which are two medals given to distinguished children’s books published in America, sell particularly well, and so do the books of acclaimed illustrators from the area like Dorothy Lathrop and Lois Lenski.
“A lot of what I pick up I do by gut. I see something that I think is really interesting, and I think that, oh, I have a customer that might like this,” he said. “I particularly like oddball things that you know they're children's books, but by today's standards, they'd be a little gruesome. Like, why would you ever give this to a child? That always amuses me.”
Forry also adapts his catalog depending on more short-term trends. For example, “there was an uptick in books about Greek mythology when the “The Odyssey” came out,” he noted. “So I try to follow those trends. If I see something is becoming really popular, I could either try to get more inventory that fits that, or I'll just advertise my inventory that fits that trend.”
Beyond bookselling, Forry is also an artist who has exhibited in local galleries, and an author who previously wrote under the pseudonym Timothy James Beck with a few other artists. He is excited to return to the Pioneer Valley this fall for the Northampton Book Fair, as he remembers this area as a place with “a lot of creative people, a lot of very intelligent people, and a lot of people that are very passionate about their various intellectual or cultural pursuits.”
Catch Forry and his catalog of interesting and coveted children’s books at this year’s Northampton Book Fair, Friday, November 20th and Saturday, November 21st at the Northampton Center for the Arts, 33 Hawley Street.
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