The Last Bookseller: A Life in the Rare Book Trade

Gary Goodman's The Last Bookseller is a wry, unvarnished chronicle of a career in the rare book trade, detailing his struggles, travels, and remarkable finds. He opened St. Croix Antiquarian Books in Stillwater in 1990, which became so successful that Richard Booth declared it the First Book Town in North America. The internet changed the book business forever, making stores like his obsolete.

Format: Unspecified
Length: 200 pages
Publication date: 28 November 2023
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press

When Gary Goodman stumbled upon a dilapidated, used-book store in East St. Paul in 1982, he had no inkling that this encounter would transform his life. Entering as a psychiatric counselor, he emerged as the store's new owner. In his captivating memoir, The Last Bookseller, Goodman vividly chronicles his often precarious, occasionally humorous career as a used and rare book dealer in Minnesota. The book delves into the early challenges, travels to estate sales and book fairs, remarkable discoveries, and the eclectic array of bibliophiles, forgers, book thieves, and book hoarders he encountered along the way.

Among the notable figures featured in the book are the infamous St. Paul Book Bandit, Stephen Blumberg, who orchestrated a daring theft of 24,000 rare books valued at over fifty million dollars; John Jenkins, a Texas rare book dealer who tragically met his demise while standing in the middle of the Colorado River; and the eccentric Melvin McCosh, who filled his dilapidated Lake Minnetonka mansion with an astonishing half million books. In 1990, Goodman, in partnership with a few associates, established St. Croix Antiquarian Books in Stillwater, a revered bookshop that thrived until its closure in 2017. This store's remarkable success and the allure it held for other booksellers prompted Richard Booth, the founder of the "book town" movement in Hay-on-Wye, Wales, to declare Stillwater the First Book Town in North America.

However, the advent of the internet brought about a seismic shift in the book business, rendering stores like Goodman's obsolete after the year 2000. In the 1990s, the Twin Cities boasted nearly fifty secondhand bookshops, a number that has dwindled to fewer than ten today. As both a memoir and a history of booksellers, book scouts, criminals, and collectors, The Last Bookseller offers an ultimately poignant account of the evolving nature of the book trade.

Weight: 262g
Dimension: 136 x 209 x 18 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781517916619