It’s nine o’clock on a Friday night in Dunedin. The breweries are full, the restaurants are turning tables, and about two hundred people are wandering four blocks of Main Street with nowhere particular to be.
The bookshop is open. One customer described exactly why that matters: “open so late so I could wander in after dinner.” Late hours matter to me more than most people would guess. A shop staffed until nine costs real money to run, and most small independents can’t afford it, so the evening goes to phone screens by default. This shop decided to pay for those hours, and I think that’s a brave and smart call. Almost no independent bookstore in this county is open at that hour. This one made a decision about who walks past its window after dark, and it’s been right about it for over a decade.
What is Back in the Day Books?
An independent bookstore at 355 Main Street in Dunedin, Florida. The phone is 727-221-0025 and the email is backinthedaybooks@yahoo.com. Three hundred and sixty-six Google reviews at four point eight.
The stock splits almost exactly in half and that split is the entire proposition. Around half is new, including current bestsellers, so you can walk in for the book everybody is talking about this month. The other half is collectible, rare, out of print, and fine bindings, which is a completely different business requiring completely different knowledge, and it’s where the expertise is.
The rare material sits behind glass. Customers mention it constantly. One wrote that it was “really awesome to see the rare books behind the glass.” That detail separates a used bookshop from an antiquarian one. Books in a case have been assessed. Somebody decided which ones belong in there and priced them accordingly.
The shop’s own phrase for what it carries is from the classics to the obscure, and it’s accurate. Alongside the books there are jigsaw puzzles near the front, gifts and accessories with book motifs, free stickers and origami folded from patterned paper, and a Florida nonfiction section that customers single out as the reason they came back.
It takes cards, Apple Pay and Android Pay, and it’s wheelchair accessible. One reviewer, reaching for a comparison, called it “a suitable replacement for those who miss Haslams” in a smaller environment, which in this region is close to the highest compliment available.
Haslam’s closing still stings for plenty of readers around here. Any shop that gives them back a little of what they lost has my respect, and I suspect Dunedin knows how lucky it is.
Who runs Back in the Day Books?
Boe Rushing owns it, and his background explains everything about the store.
He’s a Clearwater native who practised law before he sold books. He’s served two terms as president of the Florida Antiquarian Booksellers Association, the trade body for dealers in rare and out of print material across this state. That’s a peer-elected position. It means the other dealers in Florida think he’s one of the people who knows what he’s doing.
The shop didn’t start in Dunedin. Rushing ran it in Tarpon Springs and moved it down the coast in 2013. Anybody who tracked Florida bookshops in that era will remember an earlier Dunedin address on Broadway. The current shop at 355 Main is the one that stuck.
The practical consequence of an antiquarian background is that the person behind the counter can look at the thing in your hand and tell you whether it’s worth anything. That’s a far rarer skill than it sounds and it’s the reason to bring a box here instead of dropping it at a thrift store.
That background impresses me more each time I think about it. A man who walked away from law to sell books, and whom the other rare book dealers in the state then elected twice, chose this work because he cared about it. I’d trust his eye over any price guide ever printed.
How do you sell books to Back in the Day Books?
By appointment, and the shop is explicit about it. They buy in store, and they ask that you call or email first so they can tell you whether the books you’re considering are ones they can use. That saves both sides a wasted afternoon. A dealer who buys everything is a hoarder with a lease. A dealer who buys selectively needs to know what’s coming through the door.
For large collections or an entire personal library, they make house calls.
That’s a bigger deal than it sounds in a county like this one. Pinellas is full of people who retired here with forty years of books, and the estates that follow are a real problem for the families left sorting through them. A dealer who will come to the house and assess a library in place is solving something a dumpster cannot.
If you’re in that position, make the call before you decide anything is worthless. People who have never handled rare material are consistently wrong in both directions about what they own, and the mistakes go both ways with equal confidence. This is the paragraph I’d most want a family clearing out a house to read. It saddens me to think of how many good libraries end up in a dumpster because nobody knew who to call, collections somebody spent a lifetime building hauled off as trash. Make the call first.
What makes a bookstore worth a Friday night?
Hours are strategy, and this shop’s hours say something specific. Sunday through Wednesday it runs ten in the morning until seven at night. Thursday, Friday and Saturday it runs ten until nine. Seven days a week, no closures, and three nights that go late. Compare that to the rest of the county. Portkey in Safety Harbor is closed Monday and Tuesday. Bitter End in Ozona opens four days. Most small independents lock the door between five and six and have done for years.
Nine o’clock on a Saturday means the shop is open when Main Street is full, after dinner, when people are out and wandering and slightly more inclined to buy a hardback than they were at two in the afternoon. Volunteer staffing doesn’t produce that. Somebody sat down and decided that being open when the town is awake was worth the labor cost, and then paid it every week.
Does Back in the Day Books host author signings?
The shop hosts signings, and the way it does so is worth reading correctly.
Steve Spears came through with Stuck in the ’80s, his book of conversations with the pop culture figures who defined the decade, and the shop posted about it the way you post about a friend stopping by. That informality is the point. It’s a shop where local authors turn up, sign stock, and the store tells its people. For a Pinellas author that’s a lower bar and a much better first target than any chain, and it’s exactly the pattern I described in getting a book onto a Tampa Bay shelf.
The Florida nonfiction section is the other thing a local writer should notice and most never do. One customer called out “a whole non fiction Florida section” as the reason they were coming back. A shop that maintains a dedicated shelf for books about this state is a shop that sells them, and that’s a market most self-published Florida authors never think to approach.
I’d put this at the top of any Florida author’s list. A shop that keeps a whole section for books about this state wants your book if it’s good, and too many local writers burn months chasing chain buyers who’ll never call back while the right shelf sits on Main Street in Dunedin.
The usual caution applies. Buy something first. Understand what the shop stocks. Then ask.
How does it compare to the other north Pinellas bookstores?
North Pinellas has an unusual concentration of good bookshops and they divide cleanly.
Portkey Books in Safety Harbor is small, new, and built around fantasy and romantasy with an aggressive events calendar. The Gilded Page in Tarpon Springs is a general new-book shop with a lounge and a full community program. Bitter End in Ozona is the antiquarian specialist with four-day hours.
Back in the Day is the one that runs both halves at once. New bestsellers at the front for the person who wandered in off Main Street after dinner, and rare material in a case for the person who drove here for it. That combination is difficult to operate because the two halves need different knowledge, and it works here because the owner came up through the rare side and then learned the rest.
For a day out, pair it with the Dunedin waterfront and the Pinellas Trail. It runs straight through the middle of town a block away.
The case for a shop with a glass case
Most used bookstores are sorting operations. Books come in, get shelved by genre, get priced by format. That’s a completely legitimate business and The Book Rescuers in Largo does it at enormous scale and does it very well.
An antiquarian shop is doing something else entirely. Somebody is looking at every book and asking what it is. What edition. What condition. Whether the binding is original. Whether anybody alive wants it. That judgment is the product, and the glass case is where the judgment becomes visible to a customer.
A county keeps that skill only as long as somebody is practising it commercially. Boe Rushing has been doing it here for over a decade while running the state trade association on the side.
I think that’s worth a Friday evening, and the shop will still be open when you get there. It’d be a real loss if this county ran out of people who know how to do this work, so give Back in the Day your after-dinner browsing and the first call about your inherited boxes.
