The last bookseller: a life in the rare book trade
Description
A wry, unvarnished chronicle of a career in the rare book trade—now in paperback When Gary Goodman wandered into a run-down, used-book shop that was going out of business in East St. Paul in 1982, he had no idea the visit would change his life. He walked in as a psychiatric counselor and walked out as the store’s new owner. In The Last Bookseller Goodman describes his sometimes desperate, sometimes hilarious career as a used and rare book dealer in Minnesota—the early struggles, the travels to estate sales and book fairs, the remarkable finds, and the bibliophiles, forgers, book thieves, and book hoarders he met along the way.
Here we meet the infamous St. Paul Book Bandit, Stephen Blumberg, who stole 24,000 rare books worth more than fifty million dollars; John Jenkins, the Texas rare book dealer who (probably) was murdered while standing in the middle of the Colorado River; and the eccentric Melvin McCosh, who filled his dilapidated Lake Minnetonka mansion with half a million books. In 1990, with a couple of partners, Goodman opened St. Croix Antiquarian Books in Stillwater, one of the Twin Cities region’s most venerable bookshops until it closed in 2017. This store became so successful and inspired so many other booksellers to move to town that Richard Booth, founder of the “book town” movement in Hay-on-Wye in Wales, declared Stillwater the First Book Town in North America.
The internet changed the book business forever, and Goodman details how, after 2000, the internet made stores like his obsolete. In the 1990s, the Twin Cities had nearly fifty secondhand bookshops; today, there are fewer than ten. As both a memoir and a history of booksellers and book scouts, criminals and collectors, The Last Bookseller offers an ultimately poignant account of the used and rare book business during its final Golden Age.
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Kirkus Book Review
A memoir from one of the last "hunter-gatherers in the book business." Goodman has all the requisite irascibility for a bookseller. Having stumbled into buying a bookstore in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1982--the original owner started at $25,000 and then haggled himself down to $2,000, without Goodman's intervention--the author writes of his sentimental education in the business. One lesson is often repeated, as when, toward the end of his career, Goodman received a few hundred books that were ruined when a roof leaked: "I had to rent several dumpsters and throw them away, again proving my thesis that there's no such thing as a free book." The foes of second booksellers are many, including bad books: Get enough junk on your shelves, he writes, and you'll get a reputation; stock enough good books, and you'll get a clientele. Still, he allows, the rules have changed with the advent of the internet, which proved a Trojan horse. Ironically, it was a used bookstore owner who concocted the inventory software that allowed anyone to hunt up the prices and availability of a book, something only booksellers used to know. "Only stubbornness, and a genuine love of books, kept me going," writes Goodman. "A sensible person would have told you that a secondhand bookstore on that block in East St. Paul couldn't survive, but then again a sensible person probably wouldn't have gotten into the used book business in the first place." That last bit is probably true, but it shouldn't deter others just mad enough to give it a try. There's a touch too much grumbling about Amazon and how hard it is to make a living, but there are lots of fun anecdotes about book thieves, bibliomaniacs, and other familiars of the book business. For a livelier account of the trials and tribulations of bookselling, check out Shaun Bythell's Confessions of a Bookseller (2020). A middling but pleasant enough entry in the library of books on books. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.