THE FUTURE OF BOOKSHOPS

Tom: What's the future of bookstores?

Gary: (laughs) Well, you've got to have some place to store it and sort it. Surround yourself with it. Bookshops will always be refuges for people who are dinosaurs, like you and I.

T:  Bookshops have been around for so long. The whole business model is shifting and it's not going to shift back.

G: I think there will be a resurgence of the bookshop. I do. Bookshops can't all be the same. There are some things that sell all the time. For instance we all have Winston Churchill sections and we all have Vermont sections, obviously. And there is a sameness to those. I used to say that classical music sections in bookstores were disappointing because every bookseller had the same ten tired music books. Then one day we got an opportunity to buy a huge collection of music books that were really great. We're still living off them. With people around here at the Marlboro Music Festival, that was a good thing. Those people came in during the summer and they appreciated it. If you come here looking for anthropology books, you're going to be disappointed. But if you come here and you are interested in fishing books, you'll find some interesting things to look at. Maybe not buy, but certainly look at. There's an appreciation for that genre here.

T: Speaking of anthropology, I thought you had a lot of books on Native Americans?

G: I do, but to me they're history books.  ...If you come here looking for children's books, you're probably not going to be thrilled, although we'll have a few really good or scarce children's books.

T: Do tourists stop?

G: Yes. They stop some times because we're the next stop. Others stop because they are book people. You can see as soon as they come through the door. You can see it in their eyes.

I always say something like "If I can point you, please ask, but roam to your heart's content." The people who are interested will ask, "Do you have any books on such-and-such?" Others might say "OK, thank you," and they are out in two minutes.

I remember things I bought, although sometimes I don't remember if we sold them. There are a lot of obscure things around here that I bought that come to mind when somebody mentions their area of interest. The other day somebody was in here looking for books about Maine, and I remembered an obscure book about the centennial of Portland, Maine that we acquired a long time ago. I dug it out and they bought it.

T: Does it bother you that books can accumulate shopwear from people handling them?

G: Yes it does, which is why we try to put more and more behind glass. I have travel wear on my books. That bothers me. But we buy yards and yards of bubble wrap which I use when I pack for shows. Road miles are hard on show books.

T: One of the things I like about selling on the internet is that a book sits on the shelf until I am ready to ship it. Our storage area is dust-free for some reason. I've got books that have been there for four years and not a speck of dust on them.

G: My friend David Carlson, D. and D. Galleries down in Summerville, New Jersey, has a schizophrenic book-life. When he and Denise, his lovely wife, are at a show, they bring an amazing selection; all these beautiful fine-leather bindings, wonderfully serious books. And they also have this warehouse space in an industrial park and that's his online business. They have thousands and thousands of books online, but when you walk into the space, they're all piled up on metal shelves, top-edge out, with number slips sticking out. So if they need book #10206, they know what rack and what pile to go to. You couldn't possible browse it. But they're not there to be browsed. And he gets more books on the shelves that way.

T: So he's both a seller of fine books and a mass-marketer on the internet.

G: Exactly. But that mass marketing aspect of his business is lucrative. He's selling numbers that are making it worthwhile for him, and the low-end can support the high-end. I think Dave does it brilliantly!

I look upon online selling like our days in Maine, when we sold lots of inexpensive books. Cumulatively you would come up with a fair amount of money at the end of the year, from selling these modest and essentially inexpensive books, which would allow you to go and buy the pricey exciting good books.

T: The danger is if you get too far into the mass-marketing aspect, at some point you are just doing it for the money.

G: Nothing wrong with that. I remember Lew Weinstein of Heritage Bookshop saying he had become more successful than other booksellers because he was never mesmerized by the book. He was never enthralled by the romance of the book. He was there to sell books for money, more money than he paid for them. Even though he did collect books himself -- he collected golf books -- he made a lot of money by selling books for a lot more than he paid for them.

T: Do you still collect Custer?

G: No I sold my Custer collection with tears in my eyes. Priced it all out and put it in the shop one day, secure in the fact that no one could possibly pay those kind of prices. I priced them high. I priced them at a point where I thought no one would buy them. And this fellow just walked right in a started stacking them up. This was some years ago.

T: You must have been glad you had priced them high.

G: No, I really didn't want to sell them. But I thought I was making the right gesture by bringing them into the shop and pricing them and all that. And this crazed man bought them. He eventually bought my house and barn as well and went into the book business. He's still there. His name is George Arrington. Arrington Books in Wells, Maine. He's a military specialist and he is very good at it. He also was Custer nut.

So then I put the collection together again. I bought all those books again. And I sold that. Today I collect books, ephemera and graphics dealing with T.R. And I collect, and have for some years, American fly fishing books. And books written by John McPhee, the great New Yorker essayist. Also novelist and poet, Jim Harrison (a writer whose work has been compared to Faulkner and Hemingway).

T: When the world-wide web started, did you get involved right away?

G: Yes. We were one of the legacy dealers on ABE, in 1996. I also remember going to breakfast with Merv Slotnick one day and he looked at me and said "I'm going to give you a great gift." I said "What is it?" He said, "Just one word: eBay." You could sell anything on eBay. Here's a tale. We sold a Mrs. Custer letter on eBay. She wrote a lot of letters, and they're all pretty much the same. She can't accept the invitation or she can, and then invariably she adds the inscription from General Custer's sword: "Draw me not without cause, sheath me not without honor."

We put up this Custer letter, "sorry I can't come to dinner, thanks for your invitation...draw me not without cause, sheath me not without honor." I think we paid eighty dollars for it. We put it on eBay, and what did it bring? $810. There was this incredible shootout, back and forth over the thing. We tried to let the guy out of the deal, but he was tickled to death to have it. We thought we're going to get this back and the buyer is going to hate us. But apparently he put a whole collection together in a couple of months, buying hundreds of Custer items on eBay.

Back then you could put up anything on eBay and people would buy it.

T: There's such a mix of markets out there, all together. A lot of it is just enthusiasm and lack of knowledge.

G: Absolutely.

T: One more thing. What's the goal in lacrosse?

G: To put the ball in the net. Like hockey.

T: Like hockey, but you have this stick with a net on it. The Indians created that game, right?

G: That's right. Baggataway it was called.

T: Any last thoughts?

G: For my entire life in the book business, we wouldn't have had a wit of success if it hadn't been for Karen. If the shop looks nice, it's because she has worked hard at it. I'm the guy who just schleps in the books and makes a mess. And she does all the unpleasant hard work, like shipping the books and cataloging a lot of it, getting it up online, and all that. I'm the glib person who gets to sit around and tell the war stories. Karen works harder than anybody I've ever known.

T: Do you do any cataloging?

G: Yes. I like to catalog. I enjoy it. But she'll sit there with stacks of books off to her left, and they all seem to make it up to the internet.

~Finis~