Biblion Used Books & Rare Finds occupies a corner shop at Second and Market Streets in Lewes, stocking a curated mix of used, rare and antiquarian volumes alongside literary gifts, stationery and original art. The shop keeps daily hours from 11am to 5pm for browsers hunting first editions and out-of-print finds.
Best for Rare and used books, literary gifts, and antiquarian finds
Biblion is a used bookshop at 205 Second Street in Lewes, Delaware, that also sells cards and gifts, with art on the walls. The shop describes its stock as a thoughtful collection of contemporary and antiquarian books, with the literary and the quirky as its strength. The majority of books arrive from regular guests through a trade credit policy, so the shelves reflect the reading habits of the town. A very small selection of new titles covers local subjects by local authors, joined by History Book Festival titles in the lead-up to that September event. Because the collection is small and turns over quickly, the shop asks callers to phone rather than email about a specific book. Cards and gifts come from other small businesses, with boxed note cards and writing paper alongside. The walls hold original art by local artists and prints by artists from around the country. Nothing is sold online, since the owners prefer the in-person experience and point visitors to their small suppliers instead. The shop does not typically buy books for cash and directs sellers to the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America. A quotation on the site calls second-hand books wild books, homeless books that come together in variegated feather.
Delaware Bay Clay runs a pottery storefront at 818 Kings Highway on Lewes Beach, hand-painting utilitarian ceramics with coastal-inspired imagery that the studio describes as offering a local perspective of Delaware coastal life. The shop keeps daily hours from 8am to 4pm, a few blocks from the water.
Best for Hand-painted utilitarian pottery with coastal Delaware imagery
King's Homemade Ice Cream has scooped cones and sundaes since 1972, when Earl King opened the original shop in a Milton general store before his son Tom and daughter-in-law Chris brought the family recipes to downtown Lewes in 1981. Third-generation owners Chelsea and Rudy have run the business since 2010, serving house-made ice cream, milkshakes and floats daily from 11am to 11pm.
Best for Classic homemade ice cream cones, sundaes, and milkshakes
Peninsula Gallery has shown fine art at 520 East Savannah Road in Lewes for decades, representing more than thirty artists working in oil, pastel and watercolor alongside coastal landscapes and realist paintings. Longtime exhibitor Howard J. Eberle showed work there for 28 years, and the gallery also operates an on-site custom framing and conservation studio.
Best for Original coastal and realist paintings plus custom framing
Dave and Drew launched Swell Joe Coffee with their wives Sharon and Karen in spring 2014, pouring their first cup that April at Surf Bagel in Lewes. The small-batch roastery now supplies dozens of cafés along the Delaware and Maryland coast.
Best for Surf-inspired Mojo and Blue Kai coffee blends
Swell Joe Coffee started with two friends who met surfing the Delaware coast: Dave and Drew launched the company with their wives, Sharon and Karen, in spring 2014, pouring their first cup that April at Surf Bagel in Lewes before the roastery had a name recognized beyond that one counter. It's grown since into a small-batch operation roasting six signature blends, each carrying a surf-world name — Mojo and Blue Kai among them — rather than the origin-first naming convention most specialty roasters use.
The distribution has grown past the founding café too: Swell Joe now supplies dozens of cafés along the Delaware and Maryland coastline, a wholesale footprint that outgrew its beach-town origin story while the roasting itself stayed local to Lewes. The surf theme isn't incidental branding bolted onto a generic roast — it traces back to how the two founders actually met, a more specific origin story than most small coastal roasters can point to.
For a visitor, the throughline is Lewes: this is where the beans are roasted, where the founding cup was poured at a bagel shop, and where the coastal wholesale network still radiates from.
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