Common Reader Bookshop (New Salem, Mass.)

Background on Common Reader Bookshop

During the spring 1977, life partners Dorothy Johnson and Doris Abramson renovated a shed attached to their home in New Salem, Mass., and opened the Common Reader Bookshop. Despite being located in a relatively obscure — and decidedly rural — community, the bookshop became a destination for scholars and collectors of rare and antiquarian books in women’s history. Much of their business was done by mail, rather than drop ins, but Common Reader also became a hub for a community of women, fostered by the couple’s annual women’s parties. In 1983, with their business growing, they relocated across the street into the town’s former Center School building.

Apart from operating the bookshop, one of a handful of businesses in New Salem, Johnson and Abramson became stalwarts of small town life, contributing to community theatricals and other local cultural events. An alumna of both Mount Holyoke and Smith Colleges, Johnson had worked briefly as a teacher and then as an editor at major New York publishing houses prior to opening Common Reader, while Abramson worked for many years as a Professor in Speech, and later Theater, at her alma mater, UMass Amherst. The couple were among the first to take advantage of the legalization of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts in 2004. They decided to close Common Reader in 2000, and Abramson died after a brief illness eight years later.