Bookstores We Love: MainStreet BookEnds of Warner
In celebration of the spirit of independent bookstores, in each edition of our 2026 newsletter we’ll profile a New Hampshire bookseller. This month we are previewing MainStreet BookEnds, on 16 Main Street in Warner.
MainStreet BookEnds is a family owned, independent bookstore, with a strong commitment to community, children, teachers, local artists and artisans, local authors, and children's book illustrators, and all who enjoy the wonder and excitement of reading the printed word.
Housed in a historic, two-hundred-year old Colonial and attached barn, Main Street Bookends opened during Warner Fall Foliage Festival Weekend, 1998. Soon after, the bookstore opened its barn, The Gallery, to the community, and since then has featured local artists’ artworks, along with yoga classes, art classes, book clubs, community meetings and lectures, concerts, and author appearances.
The store almost didn’t come to fruition. Owner Katharine Nevins recalls that when she and her husband approached a bank for financing, the bank almost turned them down three times. “Amazon had just appeared on the scene–the bank said there was no way an independent bookstore would survive,” she says. But 28 years later, MainStreet is an anchor establishment in Warner, and attracts customers from around the Lake Sunapee region.
Nevins adds that Main Street Bookends aims to reflect what’s going on in Warner, a culturally rich town. “BookEnds is a safe haven–people can come in at any time and feel protected within our walls,” she says. “There is a lot of healing that goes on in a place like this, where people are allowed to come in and relax and wander.”
—Elaine Loft
Selected MainStreet BookEnd’s Staff Pick:
Alice Elliot Dark’s Fellowship Point. Set in coastal Maine, this work of contemporary fiction is about the decades-long friendship between two women, and how it is challenged when they must decide the future of a piece of land they both love. Nevins, who has spent many summers in Maine, cited the book both for its depiction of another state she loves, and for the deeper issues it raises about the stewardship of land.
