Pioneer Press: Gary Goodman writes about his life as a rare sort of bookseller

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.

A wry, unvarnished chronicle of a career in the rare book trade—now in paperback“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.”

Read the article at Twin Cities Pioneer Press.