About Us

Information about btc, our history, policies — all your questions answered.

Our Historic Area & Building

Between the Covers is located in Gloucester City, NJ, a town on the eastern bank of the Delaware River, across the river from the southern tip of Philadelphia, PA. Gloucester City was first settled by Europeans in 1623, when Cornelius Mey (of Cape May, NJ fame) built Fort Nassau there on behalf of the Dutch West Indian Company.

For the past 385 years Gloucester City has remained an active port town, only very occasionally coming to national prominence. In the late 1800s its baseball fields were the part time home of the Philadelphia Athletics. In the early 1950s musician Bill Haley and His Comets, then called Bill Haley and the Saddlemen, were the house band for a local bar, where he worked on blending his country music style with African-American popular music and jazz to form the roots of rock and roll.

Our building, which houses our offices and our inventory of over 200,000 books, was built in 1922 as the Gloucester Heights School. It remained an elementary school until 1996. We purchased the building in 2000.