“I wonder how many years are left for stores that sell used books,” Gary Goodman muses. “We face a difficult future.”
Still, this veteran bookseller is celebrating 20 years in a business that has seen 70 percent of the nation’s bricks-and-mortar rare and used-book stores close in the last six years.
Goodman came to bookselling in 1982, almost on a whim. A native of North Dakota and graduate of St. John’s University in Collegeville, he was a psychiatric counselor at Fairview-Riverside Hospital when he bought “on impulse,” a small used-book store at Arcade and Maryland in St. Paul. He learned right away that his 10,000 books were virtually worthless, and it took him about four years of “trial and error” to figure out what he was doing as a neophyte bookseller.
Goodman often did business in those days with Jim Cummings, who operated his used-book business out of his Stillwater home. After Goodman and his wife, Mary Pat, moved to Stillwater, Goodman partnered with Cummings and Tom Loome ( owner of Stillwater-based Loome Theological Booksellers). They opened St. Croix Antiquarian Books in 1990.
“We were taking a big risk. There were no bookstores in Stillwater,” Goodman recalls. “But we were successful from the beginning.”
When Cummings left the partnership in 1994, Goodman and Loome expanded their business by opening Stillwater Book Center, which offered books from 25 dealers. When that cooperative was sold, they sponsored Midtown Book Center, with books from 14 dealers.
Goodman describes the mid-’90s as “the last golden age” of used-book-selling in the greater Twin Cities area.
“People were coming from all over the world to Stillwater,” he recalls. “Between our two stores (St. Croix Antiquarian and Stillwater Book Center), Tom and I were selling a million dollars worth of books a year.”
The good times peaked in 1994, when Stillwater was declared the first Book Town in North America by Richard Booth. An eccentric who has reputedly bought and sold more used books than anyone in the world, Booth operates out of his medieval castle in Hay-on-Wye, Wales, where he has declared himself king.
By 1996, Goodman knew the Internet was going to have a big impact on bookselling. He jumped on this new technology, hiring two full-time employees to do Web work. For a while, Internet orders made up half of his business.
But selling on the Web became less profitable as people who’d never sold books challenged experienced dealers.
“There was a time when the bookseller was king,” Goodman recalls. “If you wanted an out-of-print book, you went to a reputable dealer. Competition on the Web from people who’d never sold books was foreign to many veteran booksellers and that’s why their stores went out of business. They couldn’t adapt.”
Selling on the Internet eventually produced a “race to the bottom,” says Goodman, who no longer sells books online. “Books that used to sell for $25 to $30, the lifeblood of used-book stores, could be found on the Net for $1. It’s like the Wild West.”
Used bookstores also struggle with new printing technology that allows customers to buy an inexpensive print-on-demand book that might have cost $200 at a used-book store. Or, the customer can find an out-of-print book in e-book format.
‘Ninety percent of everything in print is available now in some form,” Goodman says. “Still, I’m doing quite well with my store. We’re in a great location.”
What he sells depends on supply and demand and “buzz.”
Golf books from the 1920s and ’30s are “worth their weight in gold,” he says. His customers are also interested in popular culture — Tarzan and Buck Rogers — and books from their childhoods, such as the Bobbsey Twins.
“For a while, Western Americana and the Civil War were hot sellers,” Goodman says. “But once there’s a glut of a certain kind of book, they’re dead as a doornail.”
Goodman’s bottom line is brightened by sales of hand-colored architectural drawings and prints of buildings in the United States and Canada that he purchased from a Minneapolis architect. “Nobody else has anything like it,” he explains.
Goodman hopes he can hang on until his 14-year-old son graduates from college.
“In 10 years, very few books will be published. They will be digital,” he predicts. “But if printed books become obsolete, it might be like the Middle Ages. Used books could be valuable again.”
Mary Ann Grossmann can be reached at 651-228-5574.
What: St. Croix Antiquarian Books 20th anniversary party
When: 7-9 p.m. Friday
Where: 232 S. Main St., Stillwater
Cost: Free
Information: 651-430-0732
