About Us
The shop was established as The Westwinds Book Shop and Lending
Library in 1946 on the second floor of the carriage house on the
Washington Street estate of Margaret Carter Metcalf. Mrs. Metcalf, who
had lived in a home named Westwindsin Concord prior to moving to the
former Eagle Tree Inn (and before that the home of stage and screen
actress Fanny Davenport), named her Duxbury home “Westwinds By The Sea.”
Her bookshop, now converted to a private residence, adopted name of the
estate (the main
house is shown below).
Mrs. Metcalf called upon resident intellectuals -- labeled "parlor
pinks" by the town's conservatives -- to add their suggestions to the
list of titles she was compiling to stock her bookshop. The resulting
inventory - the shop’s collection on Asia rivaled anything in Cambridge,
Massachusetts - was more that of a library than a store. (Mrs. Metcalf
and the subsequent owners have all jokingly insisted that theirs is a
bookshop and not a bookstore. It is not a storage facility for books,
but rather a place to shop for the perfect read.)
Following Mrs. Metcalf ’s death in 1957, the shop moved up Washington
Street to Snug Harbor, and then to its current location in a charming
gray cedar shake building in Duxbury Marketplace on Depot Street.
Westwinds is proud to continue Mrs. Metcalf ’s tradition of hosting
author receptions and booksignings, and collaborates regularly with the
Duxbury Free Library to feature writers, illustrators and poets.
