🔒Pre-season’s greetings: Perkins Cove businesses spring to life on cusp of Oqunquit’s busy season

Inside the bookstore at the foot of Ogunquit’s Perkins Cove district, John Ranco rattles off names and bios of Maine authors like they’re old friends. “She summers here,” he says of novelist J. Courtney Sullivan, leafing through “The Cliffs,” a mystery set in the fictional seaside town of Awadapquit. Then it’s on to Anthony J. Pucci’s “Murder on the Marginal Way,” whose cover depicts Ogunquit’s coastal cliff walk. “He lives in Ogunquit. Retired CEO. And it’s actually a great book,” Ranco says. “Isn’t the Beachmere mentioned?” co-owner John Clancy chimes in about a nearby hotel. He and Ranco stock around 3,500 titles at Perkins Cove Bookshop, which they opened last year amid a cluster of boutique shops, eateries and galleries housed in refurbished fishing shacks. Though the small pedestrian loop is doable in minutes, visitors like to linger, lunch on benches, and stop to hoist the wooden footbridge for passing vessels.

Currently open four days a week, the town’s only bookstore — at one point there had been three — will ramp up to daily operations in May when tourists start descending upon this 1,600-population town about 15 miles from Maine’s southern edge. By summer, daily visitors can average in the tens of the thousands, especially on show nights at the Ogunquit Playhouse when traffic can snarl for miles along U.S. Route 1. That’s not the case this Friday morning, when bright rays of sunshine flirt with a crisp breeze like daffodils springing to life after winter. It’s a fitting metaphor for business owners waxing hopeful in this gem of a place that feels far removed from harsh economic realities, gearing up for the busy season in one of Maine’s most popular summer destinations. At an empty storefront across from the bookstore, workers are installing counters and equipment at a coming attraction called Compass Rose Coffee & Creamery that owner Vander Forbes aims to open before Memorial Day. The shiny gelato freezer display stands ready. “We still have some work to do — still some sheet rocking to do in the bathroom, plumbers more or less have everything ready for us, electricians hopefully can be finishing up by the end of the day Monday and hopefully getting the equipment in next week,” says Forbes, a lobster sternman and fishing-charter operator who previously worked in the food service industry.

“I did the corporate thing for about 10 years and I had enough,” he says. “I prefer this.” Rob Haslam, a former merchandiser for a book company who’s buying Perkins Cove Pottery Shop from bookstore owners Ranco and Clancy, has had a similar corporate-to-shopkeeper arc. “My life’s moving north,” says Haslam, who commutes from Portsmouth, N.H.,to run the store, a high-end gift shop bursting with treasures from octopuses under glass to a five-foot-tall wooden crane from Indonesia standing guard inside the front door. At Amy Kelly’s TaleSpinStudio, multi-colored glass discs called rondelles hang in the gallery’s ocean-facing windows and the walls are covered with mixed-media canvases featuring lobster tails and other nautical themes in bold blues and reds. Grabbing a sample of loose netting used as overlay on some of her works, the former lobsterwoman says, “I found this at a hardware store and it really fits the bill.” Downstairs at a pop-up gallery that opened for the season on April 1, Rosanne Stavola is on duty for the Maine Art Collective. Stavola, who spent her career in environmental emergency response before reinventing herself as a commercial artist, says it took some experimentation to price her own paintings. She’s a fan of the collective business model where artists sell each other’s works. “We had a little sale today,” she beams. The customer “saw a painting and it reminded them of their grandchildren,” she says.

Like a real-life painting above the small boat harbor, the white wooden footbridge overlooks an idyllic scene that would have made for a far better Cabot Cove, the fictional Maine town featured in “Murder, She Wrote,” a TV series filmed decades ago in Mendocino, Calif. There’s no Hollywood substitute for Perkins Cove, where Chris Eager owns the Footbridge Lobster red takeout hut along the small inlet harbor. Open since late March for its eighteenth season, it serves lobster rolls with heaping portions of meat spilling out of thick warm buns. “It’s the best lobster roll in Maine,” boasts Eager, who sports a blue-lobster arm tattoo to commemorate a rare catch more than 20 years ago that inspired him to go into lobstering. Eager currently sells more than 60 lobster rolls a day and averages around 400 in the summer. He has mixed feelings about whether to expand, saying: “I would definitely find something with more indoor seating, out of the weather … then again, you’re gonna lose the charm.” On opening day at Perkins Cove Candies, Josee Frigon leaves with a bag of licorice to take back home to Canada’s Eastern Provinces, where she owns a furniture and design services business. She makes the four-hour drive to Ogunquit every summer and added a spring trip this year, even as some of her compatriots are avoiding U.S. travel to protest White House policies. “We can’t stay away for long,” she says.