Inside the entrance to Chris Evers’ used bookstore on Partition Street in Saugerties is posted “A Doctor’s Advice.” It is from Dr. Seuss:

“Fill your house with stacks of books, in all the crannies and all the nooks.”

“Is this good advice?” I asked him. “It’s good advice for my customers,” he said.

Evers’ Our Bookshop has so many books there is hardly a nook or cranny left to fill: 25,000 shelved in the store, plus another 25,000 not on display, in his kitchen, basement, bathroom, attic and six sheds behind the building.

The people stream in, browsers and customers, from the city and from all over the Hudson Valley, as far north as Albany, to the store Evers opened in 2000. That was when he turned 60, the year he had planned to take the bookstore plunge. “It’s the only thing in my life that worked out like that,” says Evers, 85.

His parents, Alf Evers and Helen Baker Evers, met at the famed Art Students League in Manhattan. He was from New Paltz; she was from Milwaukee. They collaborated on 50 children’s books, which he wrote and she illustrated. He also wrote books on local history.

In 1943, when Chris Evers was three, they moved to Woodstock, where he was raised in a house on Lewis Hollow Road. “I grew up in a kind of literary household,” he says, but that did not set his career path. “My father was rather difficult to compete with, so I went off in a different direction.”

For 40 years, he was an electrician, carpenter and plumber. The work led him to write a book about his trades: “The Old-House Doctor: The Essential Guide to Repairing, Restoring, and Rejuvenating Your Old Home,” first published in 1986 by The Overlook Press.

Evers was working on a second book, on the history of North American building materials, traveling to bookstores all over the Northeast to do research. “Finally, I had an epiphany: I liked doing that better than housing. I wound up not finishing the book, refunding the advance, and the book turned into the book shop.”

He started with a house and a barn full of books. His stock now seems to know no bounds, as he has added LPs, CDs, old maps, postcards, once-popular but now obscure magazines, and paper ephemera to the ever-expanding inflow of volumes. There are sections on birds, dogs, cats and horses. Photography is a popular area.

His kitchen is at the back of the store, his bedroom upstairs. Inside are aisles of books by category: local history, American history, world wars, Civil War, African and Asian history, presidents, old technology, automotive and railroad and nautical, natural history and fishing, cookbooks, children’s books, paperback “classics.” The list goes on and on.

The downstairs bathroom is devoted to horror, sports and chess.

On the second story are biographies and memoirs, occult, Judaica, mythology and folklore. Another bathroom holds books on medicine, economics, geography and genealogy, and vintage “sets,” like a six-volume collection of Jack London’s work. Our Bookshop is nothing if not eclectic.

Evers built all the bookcases, and their different depths determined their contents. In one aisle, there are eight-inch-deep shelves on one side and 10-inch-deep shelves on the other. So it became a matter of space over subject.

Evers takes credit cards but also cash, for which he has an old-fashioned register that rings with a classic ka-ching. By the register is a small stack of his own “The Old-House Doctor,” marked “Written by the Proprietor,” for $14, and a few of his father’s books, including “The Catskills: From Wilderness to Woodstock,” “Woodstock: History of an American Town” and “Kingston: City on the Hudson.”

Stepping carefully up and down steep stairs with railings and metal hand grips, Evers leads a visitor on a tour of rooms with books not yet priced for sale. “I’m starting to run out of space,” he says. “It’s getting disorderly. I don’t know what I’m going to do about it.”

The sheds behind the kitchen contain more shelves and stacks of boxes of books. All told, there are six or seven “capacious sheds stuffed with books. I’m not a hoarder. The idea is to bring them out front.” But it’s a slow process.

Evers doesn’t put anything valuable in the sheds because, he says, “I lose a certain number to rodents, squirrels, mice.” He intends to sort through all of the unsorted piles someday. Does he have too many books? “No, that’s a false rumor. There is no such thing.”

Evers used to go to estate and yard sales but stopped “because I get enough books just from phone calls and referrals, so I don’t have to compete with anyone there. It makes it much less stressful. I’m willing to part with any book, but I do seem to buy more than I sell, so they pile up. I don’t like it, but I hate to go out and rent space elsewhere.” Yet he concedes, “It’s total chaos.”

The private tour continues. In the basement, books are arranged alphabetically. The space also holds his workbench and a few bottles of wine. Last year a building inspector required him to put doors on two bookcases that were too close to the boiler.

Up narrow steps to the second floor, Evers unlocks a door to yet another private area, where he keeps more valuable books and those “I can’t figure out what to price.” There is an old book press — he actually has two of them — that he bought at a yard sale years ago. He uses it to flatten old books that have gotten out of shape.

There is much more to selling used books, it seems, than at first appears. Chris Evers’ bookshop is a welcome antidote to sweeping technological change. Our Bookshop is in this way countercultural, a tactile paradise.

But what of the future? Evers, as he did when he decided to open the shop at 60, has a plan. It involves his daughter, a school counselor in Ulster County who is interested in running the shop in two years, when she retires. That would free Evers to do all the sorting of the 25,000 miscellaneous books stored here and there and not yet for sale.

Meanwhile, he was planning a trip to Vassar, where a retired professor in his 90s was ready to part with “tons of books,” some of which Evers hoped to acquire. Where would he put them? “I don’t know,” he said.

Evers turns 86 in September. In two years, he will be 88. “My father was still working on his last book when he was 99,” Evers notes. He hopes he will also have many years left in which to get his house of books in order.

Our Bookshop, 97 Partition Street, Saugerties, NY 12477, is open 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sundays. our-bookshop.com; (845) 246-3106; ourbookshop@hvc.rr.com.

Since 2019, Eugene L. Meyer, a former longtime reporter at The Washington Post, has been residing in Saugerties while also maintaining a home in Silver Spring, Maryland.