The Last Bookseller: A Life in the Rare Book Trade

This book was just....okay. It checks all the boxes of being an acceptable memoir, but doesn't really rise to be anything I'd recommend to someone. The author buys a used bookstore for a song and gets swept up into an industry he knows basically nothing about. Against odds he makes it work, both from the friends he made along the way and his ability to try new things to see what sticks. He remains a bookseller through the advent of the internet, and manages to make it work for a full 30 years before finally calling it quits. Admirable, when many bookstores went belly up just months after Amazon took over.

We get a lot of anecdotes and funny stories about how he began, what he did for new merchandise, and how he made it work later on, and then interspersed between these we get book history, backstories of prominent figures in the used book world, and a glimpse into how things work behind the counter. While the author does a good job of telling things in an amusing, lighthearted way, things also felt really disjointed.

I guess I basically enjoyed the read, but I'm not sure if I'd recommend it to friends.