🔖 The Last Bookseller: A Life in the Rare Book Trade by Gary Goodman
How do you get your books? In the age of technology, it’s been easier than ever to find and buy books from sellers. What does this say for the secondhand booksellers whose business thrives on people hunting for books and coming into their stores to discover a world of wonders?
Gary Goodman, long-time secondhand bookseller of Minnesota, writes an interesting and amusing account of what it was like to be in the book business and what the beginning of the end (internet selling) was like, how it impacted the book industry.
Full of entertaining anecdotes, colorful characters, and a dilemma, The Last Bookseller is a great bookish book about books. It gives you a look into the wild and, sometimes dismal, lives of secondhand booksellers. One thing that I loved was that it uncovered and brought attention to the book scene of Minnesota, a state that often gets overlooked for the more famous states (New York, California, Chicago, etc.)
As someone who lives in Minnesota and is interested in its history, this book was refreshing and informative. It also gave me great joy in knowing that Stillwater was once considered a “book town”.
