On a recent Friday morning, I showed up to Moravian Book Shop a little before the store was to open. Moravian is the oldest bookstore in the United States, founded in 1745, and has expanded many times over the years, taking over neighboring buildings. It now occupies 15,000 square feet on Main Street in downtown Bethlehem, Pensylvania. I wasn’t sure where to go in. Such a large footprint means the store has a few front doors.

Lisa Girard quickly spotted me from inside, brought me in out of the wind blowing up from the Lehigh river, and began explaining just how a bookstore (a warm one, I might add) has managed to stay open for so long. Moravian even opened a second location in nearby Allentown last year. That’s an unusual longevity for a business in this corner of the country, where one of the world’s mightiest steel mills, Bethlehem Steel, couldn’t keep a business going long into the new century.

“You have to get creative, and I think that’s been evident over the years,” says Girard, the shop’s general manager. “I know this downtown has seen its rises and falls. There used to be some big department stores on this block that are now defunct and gone, but this place has been steady and true. We’ve created something here. What you hear people say is we’re an experience.”

In fact, Moravian may be the oldest continuously operating bookstore in the world. There is some dispute on this point. John Smith & Son, a bookshop in Scotland that closed in 2000, often laid claim to the title, but it was reportedly founded in 1751. That would make it six years younger than Moravian. The Bertrand Bookstore in Portugal’s capital city of Lisbon also claims the title, having opened in 1732. But it only moved to its current location in 1755 – the original location was destroyed in an earthquake.



In 1745, four years after Bethlehem’s founding, the keeper of the Bethlehem Inn, Samuel Powell, took the advice of his Moravian bishop and began importing and distributing books. By 1755, the new business was going by the name Bethelhemer Bücher Shop and had an inventory of more than 5,000 books.

Most of the early books were religious in nature, and the shop for a time included both printing and publishing, in addition to selling books. The shop moved to Arch Street in Philadelphia for two years in 1856 before returning to Bethlehem in 1858 and moving into the building that is the current main entrance in 1867. The store took its current name in 1905 and has expanded four times since 1970 to occupy its current space.

Changing times have, nonetheless, affected the store. “Probably around 2007, when the whole economy started its big plunge, we definitely felt those effects,” Girard says. “Books were always our leading seller, but the book sales kind of dropped off.

“Bethlehem is known as the Christmas City, and we sell a lot of Moravian stars,” she continues, “so that was huge for helping us some days back then. But books started to come back, especially in the last two years. The Kindle, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon are huge competitors for us, and a shopping center opened close by in one of the wealthier neighborhoods that kind of chopped us off at the knees again. But I tell people, we’re different. Barnes & Noble may be big and they may have a lot of stuff, but they don’t offer what we do.”



Moravian Bookshop moved into its current, 15,000 square foot space in 1867. Photograph: Moravian Book Shop

Like a lot of independent bookstores, Moravian sells from the lists of some of my favorite indie presses like Graywolf Press and Soho Press. But it also has large portions of its store dedicated to items that are not books or book-related, such as a gourmet candy counter, and large areas dedicated to regional gifts and Christmas items that have in times past helped keep the store afloat, says Girard.

Girard, who has just taken over as general manager after being with the store for 11 years, is bullish about the future. When asked what she thought about the possibility of Amazon opening more brick-and-mortar stores, Girard smiled.

“I’m going to pay attention to it, and I’m going to follow it. But we hold our own. We’re not going away,” she says.

Lingering long past a pronouncement of death turns out to be something of a theme for the bookstore. It has a genuine, bona fide ghost, according to Girard.



Jane Clugston, who sells children’s books and has been with the store for almost 30 years, can corroborate. She told me that one night, while closing the store with a fellow employee, she saw a dark figure in a back hallway of the store, going into the kitchen. She and the coworker followed the figure back. Then, she says she realized the back kitchen stove was on, as well as the fan.

“I don’t know why this person, ghost, spirit drew us back there, but I guess to turn off those appliances,” says Clugston. “I’d never thought of it until I told someone else and they said a ghost led you back there. But in that back hallway a lot of people have said that they’ve felt things and they’ve seen things.” It’s like something out of a book.