I am returning to New England this month to lead a tour of historic sites related to the Native Hawaiian students of the Foreign Mission School in Cornwall, Conn. My first stop in Boston for decades has been the Brattle Book Shop, located right off the Boston Commons, and few blocks away from the Park Street Church. I paid a visit earlier this year during the Boston Blizzard of February 2026, looking forward to experiencing summertime New England weather on my upcoming visit.

I met Ken Gloss proprietor of the Brattle Book Shop in February 2026. You might recognize Ken from his ongoing appearances as an antiquarian book and print expert on PBS’s Antique Roadshow TV series. The story of how Ken and preceding him his father, have kept alive the centuries-old tradition of Boston bookstores can be read here. In a box of ephemera pieces I discovered vintage Hawaiian Historical Society reports from c. 1900, at a very good price too. In writing my book The Providential Life & Heritage of Henry Obookiah I used for reference many books found in the Hawaiian-Pacific section at Brattle Book Shop. The nineteenth-century map of Connecticut printed on the cover of my Obookiah book was found in an 1850s geography book I serendipitously culled from the shop’s open air lot of bargin books.

Brattle Book Shop during the Boston Blizzard in February 2026.

Colorful book spines decorate the bargain book lot located adjacent to Brattle Book Shop.

This locked glass case of in the Park Street Church’s library contains my book The Providential Life & Heritage of Henry Obookiah. Also a copy of Partners in Change, the Hawaiian Mission Houses encyclopedic biograhical collection of Hawai‘i missionaries published to commemorate the 2019 bicentennial of the the departure of the pioneer Sandwich Islands Mission from the Long Wharf in Boston in October 1819.