Support Your Locally-Owned Bookstore: Oblong Books and Music
by Ross Rice

Dick Hermans had other plans. Well, actually he originally didn’t really have ANY
plans. Mom and Dad realized that small-town Milan (New York) might not suitable for their wild child, so off to private school he went. That’s when the plan started coming into focus: to become a writer, so on to Johns Hopkins University for several attempts at a degree in journalism, finally finishing up in Tucson, at the University of Arizona. It was a good plan, shaking things up with the printed word, giving voice to the antiwar and antinuclear movements, making a difference. But then, life took a left turn....

Toward home.

Returning to Dutchess County for his brother’s wedding, Hermans liked what he saw of his old stomping grounds. Green trees instead of desert, cool weather instead of 120 degree Arizona summers, and a place where he felt more at home politically. That, plus his girlfriend moved to Millerton. Hermans made the transition back to upstate New York, and stepped briefly into the family business to save up money for what was becoming his real interest: music. “I had worked at a record store in college and was also a disk jockey. My girlfriend had a lot of book interests, a great reader. We needed to start a business…I was working with my father and brother in their insurance agency, trying to make some money! I scraped enough together to start the store with Polly, my partner...rented a small space in Millerton that used to be a liquor store, drove down to the City (New York) for a wholesaler, filled the pickup truck with books and brought ‘em back. That’s how you did things.” Between books and music, Hermans figured, they could make a good go of it in Millerton, and they opened the new store in 1975.

When it was time to name the place, Hermans was inspired by an old railroad map of the county. Since being settled in the late 1600s, the border between Dutch New Amsterdam and British Connecticut was generally in dispute. After the Revolutionary War, the dispute needed to be reconciled, but the states’ respective surveys were off by a mile and three-fourths. This narrow strip, running from the Massachusetts border to the bottom of Putnam County, was referred to as “The Oblong.” Plus, it sounded cool.

Gradually, Oblong Books & Music took root in the community, pulling in business from western Connecticut, as well the northeastern corner of Dutchess County. Soon they moved to a space three times larger across the street, and then finally bought the building they’re in now in 1990. In 1994 they purchased another building that shared the backyard, just around the corner (which is now the Kid’s Store) and linked the two together via the backyard. With a hardearned, solid customer base well established by over twenty years of service, it was time to see if the apparent success could duplicated elsewhere.

Word reached Hermans that the owners of newly-built Montgomery Row, just off the main square in Rhinebeck, were looking for a bookstore to move in. Fortunately, Rhinebeck was the perfect kind of town for a new book/music store, with a reasonably affluent and cultured population that was at the time under-served. A big September opening was planned, with well-known actors (and Millerton regulars) Edward Herrman and Jill Clayburgh giving some readings. But something happened 4 days before the big opening on September 15.....2001.

Even though everything had changed, and the world was a different place that opening day, Herrman and Clayburgh came anyway, with their own selections chosen in response to the tragedy of 9/11, and those in attendance remember a poignant and cathartic evening. Hermans says simply, “needless to say, it was a low-key opening.”

Eventually, Rhinebeck has come to embrace Oblong. “It’s taken us five years to get where...I felt that this summer we made great strides, weekdays being busy. Rhinebeck’s actually a pretty hot little town.... not many places like it. I don’t think we could move our store out to a strip mall and expect anything to happen. But in a community that has the chance to still perceive itself as a community....a bookstore is a good interesting place for people to interact, find out things, discover.”

Oblong’s weekly guest author series also provides a bonus for book lovers and authors alike. A recent reading featured Private First Class Richard Boes with his book The Last Dead Soldier Left Alive, and Derek McGee with his When I Wished I Was Here. Boes was a Vietnam vet who survived post-traumatic stress syndrome and put his experiences into his fictional account. McGee is a local Rhinebecker who served in Iraq, and came home with plenty of things to write about. Both had lived the words they had written, and neither was a polished public speaker. According to Hermans, it was the best reading he had ever been present for since the opening.

Oblong is not shy about supporting local writers, from the independently published to bigger names like James Gurney, author of the Dinotopia series, best-selling memoirist Da Chen, and worldrenowned photographer Annie Leibowitz. The music section, with a worldwide range of selections, has locals like the Felice Brothersand Ollabelle next to the new Prince release. Hermans still holds out hope to have live music on occasion in the middle of the store, pointing to an area that at one time might have had room for music, but is presently crammed with tables covered with new releases. He chuckles ruefully...yeah, maybe someday.

The Rhinebeck store’s first big test was when Barnes & Noble moved in across the river on Route 9W in Kingston. “That knocked our business down about 10 percent that first year. But we’ve taken our hit from that.” One reason they have maintained a loyal customer base is good service. You can request a CD that’s not in stock at the store at 5 PM, the order goes to a company in Florida,
gets filled out in California, and is shipped out of Kentucky, hitting the store the next morning. While I was chatting with Dick at the Rhinebeck store, a woman came in asking for a new book, apparently about a Jewish family. It had the word “day” in the title. She’d heard something about it being pretty good from a friend. Hermans ambles over to the computer and after a few quick clicks guides the woman to the right aisle. (Of course, the book title didn’t have “day” in it.)

Hermans seems content although the two stores require his constant attention. Keeping up with the “ones and twos,” making sure re-orders are made, means a lot of computer time. But, when asked about the potentially diminishing popularity of books in the face of electronic publishing technology, he’s unconcerned. “It won’t be this century… there’s still enough trees! Hopefully by
the middle of the century everything will be on some kind of recycled material. I don’t see any sign of any publishers letting up on the number of books they feel they need to publish. There’ll be a little bit of a lessening of that, hopefully...there’s too much to sift through. There’s so much out there...too many...same in the music business; hundreds of new releases...a week! Of which you can stock, weekly, probably less than twenty.” Hermans still reads the publishers’ catalogs regularly, does all the orders, and keeps up with around 45,000 items in inventory. The man puts in the hours.

Even in these modern times of zip-zap-zowie media technology it’s important not to underestimate the importance of the local bookstore or the local music store. It’s still one of the few places where all interests find a nexus point, where information and entertainment meet in a way that diminishes neither and where a community can find artistic and educational sustenance. Dick Hermans and
Oblong make their towns better places.