The Last Bookseller: A Life in the Rare Book Trade
Gary Goodman
Jan 2022 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Tristan Morris
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5 hr 55 min
Unabridged
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About this audiobook
When Gary Goodman wandered into a run-down, used-book shop that was going out of business in East St. Paul in 1982, he had no idea the visit would change his life. He walked in as a psychiatric counselor and walked out as the store's new owner. In The Last Bookseller Goodman describes his sometimes desperate, sometimes hilarious career as a used and rare book dealer in Minnesota. Here we meet the infamous St. Paul Book Bandit, Stephen Blumberg, who stole 24,000 rare books worth more than fifty million dollars; John Jenkins, the Texas rare book dealer who (probably) was murdered while standing in the middle of the Colorado River; and the eccentric Melvin McCosh, who filled his dilapidated mansion with half a million books. In 1990, with a couple of partners, Goodman opened St. Croix Antiquarian Books in Stillwater, one of the Twin Cities region's most venerable bookshops until it closed in 2017. The internet changed the book business forever, and Goodman details how, after 2000, the internet made stores like his obsolete. In the 1990s, the Twin Cities had nearly fifty secondhand bookshops; today, there are fewer than ten. As both a memoir and a history of booksellers and book scouts, criminals and collectors, The Last Bookseller offers an ultimately poignant account of the used and rare book business during its final Golden Age.
About the author
Gary Goodman is a semi-retired rare book dealer in Stillwater, Minnesota. He put six kids through college selling secondhand books, a feat that makes him a Genuine American Hero. He is coauthor of The Stillwater Booktown Times and The Secret History of Golf in Scotland.
Tristan Morris is an AudioFile Earphones Award-winning audiobook narrator who originally hails from Seattle, Washington. A proud member of SAG-AFTRA and Actors' Equity, he currently lives in New York City with his wife and daughter.
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