Baldwin’s Book Barn is a literary gem bursting with used books, and maybe a few ghosts

Seven days a week, except Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day, Carol Rauch works among the books and ghosts in a cavernous, centuries-old barn in West Chester.

Rauch, 91, is the longtime manager of Baldwin’s Book Barn. Nestled in the Brandywine Valley, the former dairy barn and milking house may be the largest used bookshop in America.

For decades a haven for booklovers, the five-story, 25,000-square-foot antiquarian bookstore is a sea of tomes, bursting with 300,000 rare and vintage books, manuscripts and maps, prints and estate antiques.

Rauch, a cancer survivor, said working in the Book Barn keeps her young.

“I learn something new every day,” she said.

Built in 1822 by Quakers Brinton and Sarah Darlington, the barn was converted to a bookshop in 1946 by William Baldwin and his wife Lilla. They sold used books and collectibles. With its country-shop feel, they called it, simply, the Barn.

Soon, they converted the old milking house into a residence and, for many years, a country-store museum. Slowly, the five floors of the barn filled with books.

Over time, their son, Tom Baldwin, who died in 2019 at 80, took over duties at the shop. He was known as a kindly bookseller who always came out of his office when he saw a customer wandering among the shelves.

Rauch, a former Realtor, began volunteering at the shop in 2010. She soon became its manager. Tom Baldwin’s wife, Kathy, still owns the shop.

It falls to Rauch and longtime employee Fred Dannaway to sort the books that fill the barn, a sprawling maze of rooms and shelves neatly arranged in nearly every imaginable category. It’s an enchanting place to get lost in.

“I tell people when they come in, that they experience their senses all at once,” said Rauch.

There’s the smell of the fire crackling in the wood-burning stove. The creak of the old hardwood floors and winding staircase, the whisper of thin pages in a leather-bound volume. The warm embrace of a rocking chair tucked into a corner of the stacks. The sheer overwhelming sight of the stacks themselves: Some look like catacombs, stretching endlessly.

(Powell’s Books in Portland is larger than Baldwin’s, Rauch said. “But they’re new and old,” she pointed out. “We just used.”)

At Baldwin’s, there are sections devoted to books on lakes and rivers and horses, to most nations and many states. There’s a whole wall of first editions, endless shelves on Black and Native American Studies. Vintage children’s books are kept in an antique case by the window.

There’s true crime and Quaker history, modern literature and Philadelphia sports. There are rooms for music and gardening and Rauch’s favorite, the reference collection on wine.

A stately presence in the old shop, Rauch greets every customer at the counter with a map and offers tours on request. Many of her hours are spent in what she calls her “dungeon” – a small side room where she pages through hundreds of books, setting prices and repairing old volumes.

They try to keep prices low, knowing customers can always check their phones for a better price on Amazon or another online bookseller. “A $27 book at the airport is $8 here,” Rauch said. “When people ask for the bargain room, I tell them every book is a bargain here.”

Book thieves have to live with themselves, Rauch said.

There have been treasures found among the stacks: Like a first-edition copy of The Great Gatsby with a printing error that Tom Baldwin found in a box of unsorted volumes. The copy sold for $100,000.

The stacks are the kind of place that makes the hair rise on your neck in awe. Others have attributed this to otherworldly presences: An old Quaker man said to sit in a rocking chair with a newspaper, and a woman said to roam the halls, perhaps searching for her next read.

Rauch has never been bothered by them. “They’re good ghosts,” she said. She’s too busy, anyway, with holiday customers.

Like Beth Murphy and her husband, George, from Newtown, who always come to Baldwin’s around the holidays.

“It’s like seeing history,” Beth Murphy said. “Just imagine who read these books before you. What stories can the books tell besides what’s printed?”

Rauch has no plans to retire from the books and the barn.

“There is nothing like it,” she said of the shop. “Nothing.”