Frequently Asked Questions

So are you in Tarrytown or Sleepy Hollow?

Short answer: Tarrytown.

Slightly longer answer: Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow are adjacent to one another and have a long, shared history. We have the same ZIP code, school system, and love of all-things-fall. Fun fact: up until 1996, the village of Sleepy Hollow was actually “North Tarrytown,” and before then Sleepy Hollow was just kind of a vague historic place (if you want to learn more on that, we have a wonderful book by local author Christopher Skelly on the referendum that changed the name.) So while Transom Bookshop resides in the village of Tarrytown, we feel a very close kinship to our sister village.

What kind of books do you carry?

Great ones, mostly. A few stinkers, naturally, but we aim to have a pretty good selection.

I kid, I kid. We carry books for kids and adults, nonfiction, fiction, and genres. But our wheelhouse is literary fiction (which is about 40% of our entire inventory), with a healthy stock of classics, horror/gothic, thriller/crime, and scifi, and fantasy. Our nonfiction includes:

  • history

  • biography and memoir

  • “mind, body, and soul” (which is a mix of psychology, mindfulness, self-help, philosophy, buddhism, spirituality, and theology)

  • science and nature

  • general nonfiction (sports, music, writing, art/design)

  • cookbooks

  • local travel, folklore, and history

We also have a well-regarded poetry section—that’s right, not just a shelf, but a whole section—that is, I’ll admit, a labor of love, but it’s robust and thoughtfully curated.

Kids-wise, we start at about 3 years old with picture books (selected by my toddler), middle grade classics, fiction, and non-fiction, and a few shelves of the most popular YA novels.

I’m sure there’s something I’m forgetting, so you’ll just have to come check it out to see.

Do you buy or accept donated used books?

Nope, sorry. We sell new books only, and aren’t interested in figuring out how to source, parse, and price used, rare, or vintage books.

Can I order a book to be picked up in the store?

You most certainly may. Email us at hello@transombookshop.com and we’ll respond tout de suite. If the book’s in our warehouse, it usually takes just a few business days to arrive here.

Can I order a book through you to be delivered to me?

Yes! For ship-to-home, we partner with bookshop.org—an incredible non-profit online retailer who has donated tens of millions of dollars to local indie bookshops. They handle the transaction and fulfillment, and donate 30% of the sale back to us. It’s a tiny miracle.

Visit our affiliate storefront here: https://bookshop.org/shop/transom

Why are your books more expensive than Amazon?

Throwing me a hardball already, huh? Ok, well, here we go:

First of all, when you shop locally (vs big-box or online), upwards of 4x more of what you spend stays local—because that money gets circulated into your community, ends up in the pockets of locals, and helps other local businesses thrive. So if you love having local businesses on Main Street—if you enjoy interacting with the shop owners and staff, and having unexpected conversations with real live humans—the only way to do it is to support your local shops.

All that said, the reason my books are full price—that is, I sell them at the price the publisher determines and prints on the book—is because running a retail shop is expensive.

As for Amazon, they are extremely confident (by way of surveillance capitalism) when you come to their site they’ll be able to convince you to buy high-margin products like toilet paper and batteries and drop-shipped crap they don’t even have to fulfill. So they are willing to sell books at cost (and sometimes at a loss) just to acquire and retain customers.

I won’t get into how much I hate Amazon as a business, but I’ll just leave you with this: last year, during the weekend of our annual Independent Bookstore Day, Amazon decided to have a gigantic book sale, and claimed it was “unintentional.” Right? Right.

So we hope (wherever you are) that you’ll shop locally, and that you can appreciate that full-price products keep your beloved retail shops in business.

Infrequently Asked Questions

Wait, did you say you have poetry?! Oh my god, can you please recommend some poetry to me?

Ah, what a wonderful and unlikely question. I’d be delighted to.

  • If you like Mary Oliver—and since you’re asking this question, you probably do—you should check out W.S. Merwin’s collected works.

  • Or maybe you’re more of a Billy Collins kinda person—a mix of heart and humor—in which case you should dive into James Tate or Charles Simic.

  • A couple wildcards that I think everyone should read: Christian Wiman (Every Riven Thing) and Franz Wright (God’s Silence).

  • If you’re stuck, you could do a lot worse than Wislawa Szymborska, who is kind of a nice through-line of all the above—she’s deceptively simple, often sneakily funny, but there’s always a strong undercurrent with serious intent.

Thanks for (probably not) asking!

What’s your desert-island book, the one you‘d read over and over again?

Oof, what a tough question to ask, which is probably why it’s so infrequent. I’ve read Catch-22 about 10 times, but not in a decade. I think that would still hold up, and likely age better than some older favorites (I don’t recommend re-reading Catcher in the Rye after the age of 19). Samantha Harvey’s award-winning Orbital was one of the only books I read and then immediately re-read—it’s that beautiful and arresting.

How do you take your coffee?

Just a whisper of oat milk. Barely a passing thought. To the untrained eye, the coffee still looks black, but I know that there’s a little oat in there, and that’s all I need.

Dude, what’s your deal?

Honestly, I’m still trying to figure that out. I appreciate you (probably not) asking, and I’ll be sure to report back when I lock it down.