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Photography by Molly Peterson
Book s and O the r Found Thin g s by Lorin Fairweather When you’re starting over, it’s generally good advice to make the most of what you have. For Allen and Nancy Robinson, that was about 15,000 books. When the Robinsons relocated to Virginia from Hawaii to be close to their grandson, they began looking for business opportunities. Allen noticed the building on Loudoun Street in Leesburg that now inhabits their shop, Books and Other Found Things, while out on a walk one day. “I thought it would make a great bookstore,” says Allen, a former ranch caretaker, hardware store owner and business consultant. “We thought, well, we’ve got a lot of books and bookcases. It was actually about the only thing we could think about doing with the resources we had.” After doing “thorough due diligence,” Allen says with a wink, the shop was open within a month and a half, just