Books & Cake Opens in Hillsdale, For Readers in Need of Both
The new store boasts readables and eatables, as well as a unique approach to organization centered on your mood.
The smells of buttercream and coffee intermingle with that of paper and ink at the new Books & Cake shop on Anthony Street beside Trudy’s Beauty Shop in Hillsdale. With a name as tightly descriptive as a Hemingway sentence, the shop is the creation of longtime friends and children’s book authors Eve Yohalem and Julie Sternberg.
The two met nearly 20 years ago at a children’s book conference in New York—“randomly, in an elevator,” Yohalem recalls—and quickly bonded over their shared love of stories and sense of humor. Both went on to write acclaimed children’s and middle-grade fiction: Yohalem’s titles include Cast Off: The Strange Adventures of Petra De Winter and Bram Broen and Escape Under the Forever Sky, while Sternberg is known for Like Pickle Juice on a Cookie and Summer of Stolen Secrets, among others. They also co-hosted the popular podcast “Book Dreams,” where they interviewed authors and cultural figures from Roz Chast to Imani Perry.
Doorway to a Dream
“Julie and I had been fantasizing about opening a bookstore for years,” Yohalem says. “When the podcast ended, we thought, let’s really look into this. We assumed we’d discover it wasn’t feasible, but every door we expected to close opened instead.” The pair scouted locations throughout the region before landing on Hillsdale, which Yohalem describes as “the crossroads of the Hudson Valley and the Berkshires.”
“There’s no other bookstore within about 20 minutes of here,” she notes, “and yet this tiny town already has four places to buy books if you count us, Rodgers Book Barn, the Friends of the Roe Jan Library shop, and Matthew White’s kitchen store [HGS Home Chef] across the street, which sells cookbooks. It’s a real community of readers.”
Read If You Need
Books and Cake also has a novel organization system geared toward what shoppers are feeling. The store’s shelves are arranged under what Yohalem calls a “giant book recommendation system.” Beyond the new releases up front and a children’s section, the majority of titles fall under surprisingly intuitive “Read If You Need” categories.
“Read if you need hope,” Yohalem says, giving examples with a bit of charming self-satisfaction. “Read if you need a laugh. Read if you need to understand our times, or experience another family’s dysfunction. Fiction and nonfiction sit together because either can satisfy those moods. And if we have multiple copies of a title, you’ll often find it in more than one category, because books aren’t just one thing.”
