The Last Bookseller: A Life in the Rare Book Trade by Gary Goodman

​Bookselling is a dying art. In fact, bookselling as Gary Goodman came to know it over the decades of being in business, is already dead. Internet murdered it. It became another casualty of the technological progress.
     I’m not complaining, for me personally the invention of digital reading has been one of the best things about this rampant advance of technology. I read exclusively digitally and love it. But for purely somatic, nostalgia driven reasons I understand the tragedy of the demise of bookstores. It’s like an end of an era. Bookstores and booksellers had a certain classic appeal,  the inimitable atmosphere. And booksellers of Goodman’s kind were a very specific breed, they hunted down books, think a pedestrian version of Dean Corso. Think someone like Apollo Kagwa, the protagonist of LaValle’s The Changeling. Even reading that fairly recent book I remember thinking…do those still exist? People who can make a living out of selling and reselling books?
      Well, they do apparently, but far and few inbetween, a sliver of what the business used to be. Goodman did it as long as it was possible and got out just in time. Interestingly enough, he got into the business completely randomly. This wasn’t a man who dreamed the romantic dream of owning a bookstore. This was a man with an already established if unsatisfactory career, who bought one on a whim, knowing nothing about the business and learning on the go.
      Learn he did and prospered and managed to raise a ridiculous number of children doing it, so major kudos there. And now, in his retirement, he gets to regale us with his tales of the business’ last decades, his time. You get to meet quirky characters and learn behind the scenes secrets and goings on. It’s a lot of fun, especially for the bookishly inclined.
      The thing is, though, through it all there’s a strong undercurrent of this is business, books are business. What drives a lot of these people, including Goodman, is profit, and books are seen as just another commodity. And for the bookishly inclined this may not be the most…romantic approach. In other words, this all seems to be done less out of the love of books and more out of just…here’s a quirky oddball way to make a living. But you get the idea that instead of books it might have been collectible figures or something and it would still be the same, just a commodifiable object. That’s kind of disappointing, to be honest. Books seem to be more than that, at least to those who love them.
       At any rate and whatever his motivations, Goodman produced a great story here, it’s engaging, humorous, entertaining. It’s considerably more pessimistic than the recent documentary movie The Booksellers on the similar subject, but it’s also a more realistic one.
        In the increasingly dumbed down and digitally attached society, the books might stand a chance, but bookselling doesn’t really. And if bookselling (the art and the business) were to have a literary tombstone, this book might just be the right fit.
        Lovely quick engaging read. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.