Susan Cote was looking out on a meadow behind her home in Williston when she came up with the perfect name for her new business.
“A meadow is teeming with life and full of all kinds of interesting things to discover if you pay attention, and I thought that a bookstore is like that,” Cote recalled. “To me, it was kind of a metaphor.”
Susan and her husband, Rick, opened Wild Meadows Books & Café in late June at 27 Market Street in Williston. While visitors won’t find an expanse of flowers inside, they can immerse themselves in a field of titles spread across Wild Meadows’ expansive shelves, including a large children’s section with early reading books, games and puppets.
They can also choose from an array of café fare: espresso concoctions and housemade lemonade, wine and beer, and pastries from Mirabelles Bakery and truffles from Birnn Chocolates of Vermont, both in South Burlington. They can plop onto the café’s couches or sit at tables to work, chat or play a game from a nearby shelf. Across the store’s walls, hand-painted murals of flowers, birds and butterflies by artist Mary Lacy honor its name.
Most important to the Cotes, Wild Meadows provides a community space that they said Williston has lacked — a spot where locals can gather for events and discover one another as well as their next read or favorite matcha drink. The bookstore is an extension of the Cotes’ efforts to multiply and strengthen the connections among town residents since the couple purchased the weekly Williston Observer newspaper in 2020.
“The intrinsic rewards of owning the paper have been so great, particularly becoming entrenched in the community and really getting to know the community,” Rick said.
They aren’t the only ones to see the link between bookselling and news publishing: The owners of Phoenix Books, which has three stores across Vermont plus Yankee Bookshop in Woodstock, did it in reverse. Michael DeSanto and his wife, Renee Reiner, were retailers first and in January bought the North Avenue News, renaming it Burlington Community Newspaper to reflect its coverage of the city’s neighborhoods.
The Cotes call Wild Meadows the “home of the Williston Observer” and use a back room as their office. Employees can meet potential advertising clients or sources at the café.
“It’s great because then you can offer them a cup of coffee,” Rick pointed out.
On a recent afternoon about a month after its opening, the café buzzed with customers, some working on laptops and others chatting, while shoppers browsed the bookshelves. A grandmother and her 4-year-old grandson picked out a large picture book and a puzzle.
Three Champlain Valley Union High School seniors who live in Williston sat in the café with an iced chai latte, a blueberry lemonade, and an ample cheese-and-fruit platter. They’d been working at a CVU camp for incoming ninth graders, and Wild Meadows offered an oasis for a needed break.
“I’ve been wanting to come here for a while, since I heard about it, because I love Barnes & Noble,” said Harper Doris, 17, referring to the national bookstore chain’s South Burlington location, which also features a café. Wild Meadows has something extra to offer, she said: “We live so close.”
Doris’ friend Hannah Daudelin, 17, praised the vibe as “very cute and cozy” and added, “It’s nice to support local businesses, too.”
The following morning, Wild Meadows hosted the Green Mountain Chamber Music Festival during its pop-up concert tour. The Cotes also organized a July 29 reading and talk at the nearby locally owned SuperStore, which offered a larger space for fans of award-winning Massachusetts horror writers Paul Tremblay and Eric LaRocca to celebrate the release of Tremblay’s new book, Dead but Dreaming of Electric Sheep.
Because Wild Meadows has a license to serve alcohol and stays open until 9 p.m. on Thursdays through Saturdays, the Cotes said they hope it will attract book clubs and other groups whose members want to kick back with a glass of wine.
The store joined locally owned clothing boutique Jane and Spaghet Red Sauce Joint restaurant in the newest building at Finney Crossing, a mixed-use development off Williston Road just east of Taft Corners. Across the parking lot, an L.L.Bean store draws shoppers, and apartment complexes spread out nearby.
So many people can walk here or take a bike ride, so it feels like we’re part of a neighborhood.
Susan Cote
“This is such a vibrant retail spot,” Susan said. “All these residential areas are right here. So many people can walk here or take a bike ride, so it feels like we’re part of a neighborhood.”
Williston’s only other bookstore is Old Town Café & Comics, in the neighboring Taft Corners Shopping Center, which specializes in comics, graphic novels and games and features a coffee bar with treats. Hyperbole Books in Richmond and a Phoenix Books location in Essex are the closest full-selection bookshops, neither with a café.
“We don’t see other independent local bookstores as competitors,” Rick said. “Our competitor is Amazon.”
Wild Meadows’ wide, open showroom and high, metal-lined ceilings and exposed utility pipes, all painted white, give the space an industrial feel, like a repurposed factory. Wooden grids in shades of green hang over the café area, warming it up with dropped lighting.
The store sells candles, stationery, mugs and bags of Mocha Joe’s beans, roasted in Brattleboro and served in the café. The owners are tweaking the book selection as they analyze sales data. Reflecting the Cotes’ work as newspaper publishers, Wild Meadows leans into current events and nonfiction titles.
“I think that it’s going to be a gathering place for people,” said Ted Kenney, chair of the Williston Selectboard.
On his recent first visit to Wild Meadows, while recovering from knee surgery, he found a welcoming environment, he said. He planted himself in a cushioned spot by a window and pulled nearby books from a shelf.
The bookstore complements the Observer as a community information source, Kenney suggested. “The newspaper reaches out to people and also has to be reactive to what’s going on in town and kind of have an ear to the ground,” he said. “A bookstore is actually kind of the same concept but in reverse, where people come to you.”
Susan, 64, grew up in Clifton Park, N.Y., graduated from Colgate University and made her first foray into the printing world by helping start an educational publishing company with a professor at Indiana University, where she later got her master’s in business administration.
Rick is from southern New Hampshire. Now 58, he graduated from Saint Michael’s College and earned his MBA from Dartmouth College.
They met while working in brand management for consumer products giant Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati. In 2004, they moved to Woodstock to live closer to family. Rick commuted to a fundraising job at Dartmouth and Susan to Waterbury, where she worked for Green Mountain Coffee Roasters.
In 2010, the Cotes moved again, to Williston. Years later, Rick was scanning “businesses for sale” websites when he saw the Observer and alerted Susan, who had left her job in 2014. She loved the idea of getting into the news business — after they did their research.
In October 2020, they bought the paper from Marianne and Paul Apfelbaum, who had owned it since 1994 but had given up its office space during the pandemic. The Cotes had always wanted a physical location. The Finney Crossing store now provides an office for the owners, though it can’t accommodate the rest of the Observer staff, who continue to work remotely.
Construction delays postponed the store’s planned 2025 opening. That gave them time to learn the retail business, about which they knew little, the Cotes said. During a three-day workshop in Florida, they watched a fellow independent bookseller run the operation in real time, from book ordering to staffing decisions.
The Cotes have four employees at the Observer and 20 full and part time at Wild Meadows. The couple have their hands in both businesses — Rick said he was about to learn the ropes at the café’s cash register.
The financial struggles of local news outlets across the country are well documented, but the bookstore business is rebounding, statistics show. The American Booksellers Association, representing independent owners, saw a 19 percent boost in membership last year, and its member retailers tallied an average 5.8 percent increase in sales in 2024 (the most recent year available) over the year before.
“We didn’t buy it because we thought it was going to be a cash cow,” Rick said of the Observer, but he and Susan expect the retail operation to help keep the news business stable.
“It’s important to the community. It’s important to the world, to democracy. It matters,” he said of the paper. “Bookstores matter, too. Ideas matter. The written word matters.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Reading the Room: Williston newspaper owners open a bookstore-café, a place to congregate and celebrate the written word”
This article appears in July 29 • 2026.
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