EVERYONE’S BOOKS
A Brattleboro Words Trail Site
Everyone’s Books:
Downtown Brattleboro
Everyone’s Books has sold “books for everyone” here on Brattleboro’s Elliot Street for over 35 years.
For thirty-five years, Everyone’s Books has stood at the corner of Elliot Street and the entrance to the Harmony Lot. Old-school champions of the printed word, the store’s owners, couple Nancy Braus and Rich Geidel, started Everyone’s Books as an embodiment of both, “their vision of a community resource and the values that Vermonters hold dear — social justice, climate-awareness and diversity.”
In the late 1980s, when Everyone’s Books first moved to its current address, the store’s political energy was matched by its upstairs neighbor, the Common Ground Restaurant, a worker-owned collective that drew free-spirits from around New England and, like Everyone’s Books, attested to the Brattleboro area’s long affiliation with countercultural movements. The Common Ground Restaurant may have closed in 2007, but Everyone’s Books remains strong.
“Harmony Lot is definitely a more peaceful place than it was [twenty years ago],” co-owner Braus said to the Brattleboro Reformer in 2019, commenting also that Brattleboro has always had some “grit” to it. “My experience, in 35 years in Brattleboro, is that it’s always been on the edge. It’s never going to be a Woodstock or a Stowe. It’s got its own character.”
Site research in progress. Check back soon for more of the story.
On The Map
25 Elliot St, Brattleboro, VT 05301
Everyone's Books
About the Research sites
The Brattleboro Words Project is working with the community to identify specific sites and themes significant to the study of words in Brattleboro and surrounding towns. Research Teams – classrooms/teachers, amateur historians, veterans, writers, artists and other community members — will produce audio segments and other work to be incorporated into audio walking, biking and driving tours tours.
