Ten years ago, Kira Wizner bought a bookstore she had never planned to own. She hadn’t run a retail business before, hadn’t dreamed of becoming a shopkeeper, and hadn’t moved to Millbrook with any grand entrepreneurial scheme in mind. What she did know was simpler—and, in a town like Millbrook, more consequential. “The thought of living in a town without a bookstore was not anything that we wanted,” she says.
That conviction has carried her through a decade as the owner of Merritt Bookstore, the independent shop founded in 1984 by Scott Meyer and woven tightly into the cultural fabric of the village ever since. Wizner took over in 2015, after Meyer’s death, at a moment when the future of the store—and the idea of a small-town bookstore more broadly—felt uncertain. A decade later, Merritt remains a place where people buy books, linger, ask questions, and decide, sometimes, that Millbrook feels like home.
Wizner and her husband, Jake, had purchased a house in the area a few years earlier, splitting their time between Millbrook and the New York City. Both were English teachers; Wizner had spent years working in education and volunteering at her daughter’s school book fairs—always with independent booksellers. When Meyer died, she visited the store’s website to read what had been written about him and learned, almost accidentally, that the business was for sale. After giving Meyer’s widow, Alison, some time, Wizner reached out. By that fall, the deal was done.
“I had no idea what I was doing,” Wizner says, flatly. “I’m a very good shopper and I’m a very good reader.” She knew books, knew readers, and knew how thin the margins could be from years of working with independent booksellers at school fairs. She didn’t yet know the language of point-of-sale systems or the rhythms of ordering and returns. What she did have was continuity. Meyer’s staff stayed on. Alison remained involved, offering both institutional knowledge and practical help. “Everybody wanted to stay,” Wizner says. “It was already kind of working.”
After taking over in 2015, Wizner moved Merritt into a nearby vacant space on Front Street and undertook a full renovation. The store that emerged was brighter, more open, and more inviting—windows cleared, shelves rethought, the layout designed to encourage browsing rather than block it. It still felt like Merritt, but it felt renewed.
If Wizner’s background as an English teacher shapes anything, it’s the way she talks about readers. Her guiding principle is matching people with books, not steering them toward a narrow idea of literary merit. “My goal was always: you find that book for that child or that person,” she says. “The same way I wanted to keep a student reading, I just want to keep people reading.”
That means leaving judgment at the door. “I don’t really judge,” Wizner says. “Sometimes people come in and they’re like, ‘I’m so sorry, I only read John Grisham.’ And I’m like, I don’t care—read John Grisham all you want.” What matters is momentum, not hierarchy. “I want customers who trust me to choose,” she says. “And I say, ‘If you don’t like it, come back and tell me—we’ll switch it out or do something.’”
That trust keeps people coming back. Wizner understands the relationship instinctively, drawing a straight line from the classroom to the sales floor. “That trust is what you do with students,” she says. “You want them to feel seen.”
Community, for Wizner, is less a buzzword than a daily practice. Merritt is open seven days a week, a deliberate decision in a town where people’s schedules don’t always align. The store supports local schools, churches, and teams, donates books, and employs local teens—often their first job in town. Some staff members have siblings who worked there under Meyer. “There’s a lineage,” Wizner says.
Outside the shop, an American flag and a rainbow flag fly side by side. Wizner is clear that while she has personal politics, the store itself is meant to remain a place where conversation stays open. “Any time you stop talking or lead with one side, it closes doors,” she says. “I only want to open doors and have people feel seen.” As a result, Merritt has become a place where people sometimes stop in without an agenda. “People sometimes just come by to say hi,” she says.
Like many independent booksellers, Wizner has learned that events are a gamble—especially in a small town. Big-name authors don’t guarantee big crowds, weather matters, and winter nights can keep people home. “If you’re pulling from 10,000 people and 40 show up, that’s great,” she says. “If you’re pulling from 1,000 and four show up, it’s depressing.” Over time, she’s learned to be strategic, bringing books to people instead of always asking people to come to books—through farmers’ markets, library partnerships, and pop-up events tied to festivals. “Sometimes it’s better to bring the books to the people than the people to the books,” she says.
Covid, unexpectedly, reinforced Merritt’s role. While larger online retailers deprioritized books, the store stayed open through porch pickup and delivery. For weeks, Wizner was often the only person customers saw. “There were a lot of people I was the only person they saw,” she says. At one point, she worked alone in the shop for nearly six weeks straight. “It was an important time for the community that we were here.”
Today, Merritt’s shelves reflect both long-standing strengths and shifting interests: strong nonfiction, children’s books, cookbooks, and timely subjects like artificial intelligence alongside multiple editions of Wuthering Heights and Frankenstein. Wizner pays close attention to what’s happening in the world and how it shapes what people want to read, without chasing trends for their own sake.
Looking ahead, she’s thinking beyond survival toward possibility. She serves on the board of Millbrook’s forthcoming Thorne Center, which she hopes will provide a home for literary and cultural gatherings that make sense for the community—author talks, shared reading experiences, and events that don’t depend on squeezing into a bookstore aisle. Lately, she says, the question she keeps returning to is simple: “What are the gaps in the community we can fill?”
Ten years in, Wizner describes the time as both brief and expansive. People continue to arrive in Millbrook, sometimes citing the bookstore as a deciding factor. Others are lost, mourned, remembered. “People keep joining,” she says. “And we also mourn the people we lose.” For her, that cycle has become part of the job. “Ten years feels both really short and really long.”
Through it all, Merritt remains a steady presence: a place to buy a book, yes, but also a place that signals something harder to quantify—that a town values reading, conversation, and the long view. In a decade defined by upheaval in both retail and culture, that persistence may be Merritt Bookstore’s most durable achievement of all.
