Readers and Writers: Gary Goodman writes about his life as a rare sort of bookseller

Dec. 4—Gary Goodman had no intention of buying a bookstore. He was 31 years old, living in St. Paul with his wife, Mary Pat, and two kids, making a minimal living working the night shift caring for mentally ill and violent adolescents who were planning to kill him by hitting him over the head with a sock filed with metal belt buckles.

So when Goodman walked into a "dismal hole" of a bookstore on Arcade Street in 1982, he was intrigued with the idea of "buying a going concern, filled with valuable books. ..."

Oh, if he'd only known, he admits in his new memoir, "The Last Bookseller: A Life in the Rare Book Trade."

After dickering with the store's owner, Goodman found himself with "four thousand bad books in a bad location and not a dime to my name."

Although he knew nothing about selling books, Goodman had set himself on a path that would lead him to be part of a group of Minnesota book men who influenced the local used book business in its last glory days, including Jim Cummings, Tom Loome, Paul "the General" Kisselburg, Steve Anderson, Larry Dingman and Melvin McCosh. Together and separately they established businesses that made Stlllwater a great book town in the 1990s. (Except for McCosh, who stubbornly stayed in his difficult-to-find, falling-down mansion on Lake Minnetonka where the dark rooms were packed with books.)

Goodman will launch his funny/sad/poignant memoir at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 9, at Stillwater Public Library, 224 Third St. N., Stillwater, in conversation with Erik Anderson, representing his publisher, University of Minnesota Press. The program is sponsored by UMP with Stillwater Public Library and Valley Bookseller of Stillwater. Register in-person at: z.umn.edu/goodman1209.

Goodman admits the title of his book needs explaining.

"People still sell books," he writes. "But I'm one of the last of a certain kind of bookseller. The kind that for 600 years rooted around basements, book bins, and bookstores looking for, sometimes, rare books or, more often secondhand books. They were the hunter-gatherers of the book business, the travelers and pickers, who spent their lives saving books that might otherwise have been lost. ...They are, now, nearly extinct, driven to ground by the machines — the cell phones, personal computers, and, especially, the internet — that replaced them at the end of the 20th century."

He recalls the "remarkable, larger-than-life, and sometimes criminal people I met buying and selling books; the unusual books I found and the weird places I found them."

Among the denizens of this colorful world were book scouts, one of whom was so poor he lived in his van and took "showers" in public restrooms using tubes and garbage bags. Another was so far off the grid he lived in the woods under a tarp. Yet these men were an integral part of the business, selling Goodman and other dealers the books they'd scrounged.

There were book thieves, too. Goodman briefly had contact with Stephen Blumberg from St. Paul. Known as the Book Bandit, Blumberg came into the Arcade store a few times, standing in the doorway "looking around with his buggy eyes." He finally asked Goodman if he had a rare book room: "I said that not only did I not have a rare book room, I didn't think I had any rare books." In 1990 Blumberg, who came from a wealthy family, was arrested for stealing 23,600 books worth an estimated $20 million in 2021 dollars.

Then there was Raylene, who Goodman describes as "one of the more colorful" collectors in St. Paul. Looking for years for photo albums her mother had sold, she filled three houses in St. Paul's Midway district with books, After she died it was discovered one of the homes was so structurally damaged by the weight of the books it had to be torn down.

Goodman never knew where his travels to buy books would take him. Sometimes families would ask him to buy all the books of a deceased collector.

One visit that saddened him was at a home in San Diego where a woman wanted to get rid of her husband's library. The husband was in the last stages of dementia but he was lucid enough to know that this stranger was taking away his collection. He'd grab a book out of the box and run away with it, leading to his wife yelling at him like a child. When Goodman suggested he leave a few books to comfort the man, the witchy wife said he wouldn't be needing them in the nursing home.

In 1989 Goodman, Mary Pat and their six kids moved to Stillwater and met with experienced bookseller Jim Cummings, who also lived in what was then a sleepy river town. By some miracle, Goodman found a buyer for his Arcade Street store in St. Paul and he and Cummings, along with Tom Loome, opened St. Croix Antiquarian Booksellers. In 1994, Stillwater Book Center opened, a collective of 30 booksellers and 90,000 books. This gave Stillwater 500,000 books within a four-block area, including Loome's Theological Booksellers, which operated out of a beautiful old church on the hill, and Cummings selling from his house.

Goodman heard about the idea of a Book Town when he visited "Lonesome Dove" author Larry McMurtry's small town of Archer City on the windy Texas plains, where the bestselling author had bought several houses, filling them with books.

With Stillwater stuffed with books, it could be considered an official Book Town, as proclaimed by "King" Richard Booth, bizarre founder of the book town movement from his "kingdom" in Hay-on-Wye in Wales, where books filled many structures, including Booth's private castle. Making an official visit to Stillwater in 1994, Booth wore his paper crown and carried an orb made from a toilet tank float, to designate Stillwater North America's First Book Town. (Booth's visit brought reporters from both Twin Cities newspapers and other media, but what didn't make the news was that the King sometimes didn't pay for books he bought.)

From 1990 to 1996, Goodman writes, Stillwater was "a kind of utopian bookselling community."

All that changed quickly from 1997 to 2000, when "onlne selling platforms, especially those developed by Amazon and eBay, began to exert a profound influence on the business, a business that had functioned almost unchanged for 600 years," he writes.

The Stillwater Book Center closed in 1998 and Goodman's store survived for a few years by selling hand-colored, 19th-century architectural maps. In 2017, he announced the store on Main Street would close.

Still, Goodman makes clear in the tone of his book that he embarked on a life of adventure when he walked into that scuzzy little bookstore on Arcade Street, where the neighboring liquor store sold a quart of Ripple wine for 98 cents.