Check out our write up in the Valley News!
Contribute to our Kickstarter here!
Mission Statement: To provide a place where people can learn, create, and strengthen community over great coffee, books, and face-to-face connections.
Our Plan: Sylvia Drake’s Books will have a wide selection of books, with a focus on LGBT+ and other marginalized voices, along with good local pastries, coffee, and other drink offerings.
The bookstore space will have comfortable seating so people can enjoy a coffee with their book or while they work.
Another room will have an open work space for collaboration, including a couple of work stations, a “makerspace” and options for printing different projects.
This room will also be adaptable to make it available for special events (movie nights, private events, author readings, painting classes, and more).
We have the space, the dream, and some investors, but we need a little more to fully bring this vision to fruition.
Hartford Village is a unique area that deserves an equally unique space for the community to gather, be inspired, and create.
We are so lucky to be in a community, including the Upper Valley as a whole, where we have all kinds of creative people looking to share their voices.
In times like these, we believe bringing people together, creating and learning together, can be truly revolutionary.
After the isolation of the pandemic and other events of the past few years, people are looking to reconnect face-to-face and we are excited to watch these connections and see what comes from them.
We also seek to be a place where people of different ages, experiences, expressions, and backgrounds can feel safe and seen.
We plan on having a variety of regular programming to bring people in.
Monthly movie nights, “Vinyl & Vino” listening parties, Sylvia’s Stitch & Bitch, book clubs, painting classes, game nights, and more are in the works and will ensure there is something for everyone.
Who was Sylvia Drake?
Our namesake comes from a woman who lived in Weybridge, Vermont in the early 1800s.
She lived with her longterm partner, Charity Bryant, and they ran a tailor shop together. They are buried in the same plot with a joint headstone in Weybridge.
Despite the times, Sylvia and Charity were important members of their community and their nephew, poet William Cullen Bryant, described their relationship with the following:
“If I were permitted to draw the veil of private life, I would briefly give you the singular, and to me interesting, story of two maiden ladies who dwell in this valley.
I would tell you how, in their youthful days, they took each other as companions for life, and how this union, no less sacred to them than the tie of marriage, has subsisted, in uninterrupted harmony, for more than forty years.”
Also, no shade to Charity, we just thought the name Sylvia Drake had a better ring to it.
