The Last Bookseller

 

Book dealer and sometime author Gary Goodman, who bought a dismal used bookstore in East St. Paul, though he knew nothing at the time about selling books, tells a good tale, not only about his own rise from those very humble beginnings to co-ownership in a prestigious used bookstore in Stillwater, but also about a wide range of dealers, enthusiasts, eccentrics, hoarders, and thieves who enliven the market, some of whom he encountered during his long and checkered career in "the trade." The writing is crisp and the tone is jaunty, though the humor tends to be mordant. Very few books, rare or otherwise, are actually mentioned, much less described in detail. (You can find that type of story in Used and Rare or Slightly Chipped: footnotes in booklore, by Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone, for example). Goodman is more interested in describing the atmosphere and some of the details of the trade and chronicling its slow and seemingly irreversible decline in the face of internet listings, which make it possible to scour the entire continent for a particular title almost instantaneously without leaving the room.

That's a very good way to find a book, and I've made use of Abe.com and other similar sites many times, but it delivers none of the surprises that browsing a used bookstore can offer, nor the conversation with unusual personalities that are often engaged in the business.

An added benefit of Gary's book for local book enthusiasts of a certain age is that they've probably been to many of the stores he mentions. I remember Harold's on West Seventh in St. Paul, where I bought a signed copy of Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop for $8. I knew Jim and Mary Laurie well and visited Laurie Books in its various incarnations in Stillwater, on  Snelling Avenue near Macalester College (where I bought a two-volume edition of Shaftesbury's Characteristics for $20) and on Nicollet Avenue in downtown Minneapolis. I have never been to their store in the North Loop, strange to say. But perhaps not so strange. Their stock is top-notch but their prices are high; I believe Jim spends a lot of time sending out catalogs to real collectors.

My store of choice, however, before it closed, was Biermeier's B & H books on the outskirts of Dinkytown, right down the street from Positively 4th Street. That's because I lived near there for several years, and also because it was easy to find a parking space out front, which is important if you're hauling in a few boxes of books to sell. I never knew Biermeier's first name. In fact, I didn't know if the slight man sitting grimly behind the desk was Biermeier.  But he had a high-quality fiction section heavy with twentieth century European classics. To this day, I'm still wondering why I didn't buy that hardcover Knopf edition of Jean Giono's Harvest with the stunning woodcuts for $7 when I had the chance. (Note: I do have the North Point Press paperback reprint with the same woodcuts, so I ought to give it a rest.)

Goodman refers to Biermeier in passing, and even gives him a first name. I was trying to find the reference just now, but couldn't. (Surprising that a book put out by the University of Minnesota Press doesn't have an index!)

photo: Mike Hazard

I used to see and chat with Melvin McCosh at the Salvation Army in the Minneapolis warehouse district, which is still there. He once invited me to one of his famous (or infamous?) gourmet dinners. I didn't go. But Hilary and I went out to his "mansion" on Lake Minnetonka many times to attend his seasonal book sales. Goodman gets the hand-written slogan of the advertising flyer right. "You need these books more than I do." Lots of stale, dusty books, many of them sitting in piles against the wall, but more than a few winners here and there among the dross. If you can spot them.

One of the few glaring errors in Goodman's book is his description of McCosh's "mansion," which he makes out to be the disused estate of a mining or a timber baron. In fact, it was an old-fashioned, multi-story brick sanatorium with rows of narrow hospital rooms lining the halls, upstairs and down.

Larry McMurtry

Goodman's book-hunting tours took him far beyond the Twin Cities, of course. The Welsh book town of Hay-on-the Wye figures prominently, and Larry McMurty's "book town" in Archer, Texas, also gets extended treatment, as does McMurtry himself. (I might mention here that Although McMurty is undoubtedly the better book scout, Goodman's book is a better read than Books: a Memoir—McMurty's unduly gossipy take on the same subject.) And there's an appendix consisting of Goodman's selected diary entries while on a book-buying tour that doesn't mention a single title but will give you an idea of the sums involved. One woman on the Upper West Side offers Goodman her entire collection for $20,000. He refuses. She drops the price to $2,000. No thanks. Finally she admits that she and her husband will be evicted at the end of the month, and he can have the collection for free. Still not interested. Goodman feels sorry for the woman, but the shipping to Minnesota would be exorbitant)

What Goodman conjures and sustains in these pages, more than anything else, is that sense of anticipation and excitement generated by the prospect of a mass of unexplored books. For the book trader, it's the thought of good deals, followed by heavy mark-ups, but also the joy of recirculating remarkable books that might easily have ended up in a dumpster somewhere. For those of us who actually read books, it's the thrill of finding that book you've never even heard of that "fills a much needed gap"; almost the book you might have written yourself, it you'd had the gumption.

In recent times I have restricted my book explorations to the book carts in the lobbies of public libraries. Our house is full of books we've read, and also quite a few we'll never read. But there is a third category of books that we might ready someday, and there's no way to tell which is which. For years, when I spotted my rare hard-cover edition of the Italian novelist Carlo Emilio Gadda's macaronic masterpiece That Awful Mess on Via Merulina on the shelf in the living room, I said to myself, "I'll NEVER read that." But one dark day this past February, spontaneously and without premeditation (which means the same thing, I guess) I saw it, took it down, and, in the course of a few days, I read it.

I liked it.    

Goodman knows he isn't really the last bookseller. Several new shops have opened in recent years, including Eat My Words in Northeast Minneapolis and Against the Grain near the Macalester campus in St. Paul. Another trend, not mentioned by Goodman, is the hybrid store that carries a robust selection of books, both new and used, intermixed. Magers & Quinn and Moon Place Books both seem to be doing well with this approach.