Why award-winning book, magazine, web, and app designer Barbara deWilde left the city behind to forge a new identity as a bookseller in small-town New Jersey.

If you have some books at home, there’s a good chance some of them have been designed by Barbara deWilde. As designer for some of the world’s leading publishers, deWilde’s designs grace the covers of best-selling books by critically acclaimed authors like Donna Tart, Lorrie Morgan, and Jennifer Egan. And then, after a decade in books, deWilde moved on to magazines, where she became art director of Martha Stewart Living and redesigned it. She then pivoted again, enrolled in a master’s program to learn new skills, and then went to work at the New York Times where she led the team that designed The New York Times Cooking app, among others. She’s also taught design and lectured widely.

After deWilde and her husband bought a weekend place in Pennsylvania along the Delaware River, they found a bookstore for sale on the New Jersey side of the river in Frenchtown.

She and her husband sold their apartment in New York, made a permanent move to the area, bought the bookstore, and set out remaking it—and their lives.

Frenchtown is far enough from New York and Philadelphia to not be home to commuters, but close enough to be home to remote workers and freelancers. It is the kind of place that more and more Soloists will find an attractive place to live and work from, with enough amenities to feel like home, but without the physical and financial toll that big cities can exact.

deWilde’s Frenchtown Bookshop can be seen not just as the second—or third, or fourth—act and escape of the urban dweller, but as an attempt at place-branding, at enhancing a community and of creating a new place that might attract others, and help a small town to grow.

We recently spoke to deWilde about the decision that led to leaving New York, about the charms of the small town she now calls home, about learning a new skill—or many skills, about the impact she wants her bookstore to have in Frenchtown, and about how her life has kind of come full circle, in a rather… roundabout manner.

As an author myself, I have to admire what deWilde has chosen to do. Owning a bookstore is a kind of a universal bucket list dream job and she’s gone and done it. My hope is that my books might one day grace the meticulously curated shelves of the Frenchtown Bookshop.

Show Notes

Barbara deWilde’s simple elegant website is an introduction not just to her body of work but to her aesthetic as well.
An interview with de Wilde about the bookshop and her decision to shift gears.
A Q&A with deWilde about her design philosophy.
DeWilde delivering a talk about the design behind the Times Cooking app.
The Frenchtown Bookshop website
The Frenchtown Bookshop’s Instagram account

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