I was always an avid reader: fiction, science fiction, natural history, dinosaurs, and on and on. I grew up in a dirty and dull steel mill town in southern Illinois, and was an introverted nerd with my nose usually stuck in a book. On Saturdays my mom would sometimes drop me off at the public library, where I’d spend hours reading, browsing, and wandering through the stacks. I do have the collector gene, but its early manifestations focused on stamps, coins, seashells, and ev

I fell into bookselling quite by accident. I had been a bartender in Toronto during the 80’s, but relocated to Southern California in the early 90’s when my dad became ill. I took a job at a Crown Books retail store as a stopgap until I could find a suitable bartending position. Little did I know at the time there was no turning back. I think bookselling appealed to me in part because my fellow employees at Crown were an amazingly eccentric and brutally funny bunch — one of t

Being around books, and buying and selling them, makes me happy. I sometimes try to enumerate the reasons why. There are the obvious explanations, like loving books both as physical objects and as embodiments of information and world views; getting satisfaction from pairing a particular book with a person who wants it; respecting and perpetuating our literary heritage; enjoying scavenging; appreciating the freedom and responsibility that comes from being my own boss in a fiel

The Penang Bookshelf specialises in buying and selling fiction and non-fiction, both new and old, principally about Malaysia, but also about the rest of Asia. “Hello bro, do the book ‘kongsi’ n ‘darurat’ still available?” So ran the text I received on my phone one day last week. Four years ago, I wouldn’t have known what the sender was trying to say. Now, however, I understood right away that my potential new customer was enquiring about two of The Penang Bookshelf’s more pop

I’ve always been an avid reader and bibliophile. I have been selling books since my first job in a used bookstore right after graduating from the University Of Washington with a degree in Comparative Literature in 1987, which makes for twenty-four years of bookselling. My partner, Sean Carlson, who also worked in the same used bookstore and was an English major, cab driver, and student activist when I met him in college, and I opened Pistil Books & News, a retail booksto

My brother and I started fooling around with the idea of starting a shop in early 2002. He was finishing up at Rutgers and my days of fruitfully mucking about with the stock market (back when you could do that – and even say it out loud) had ended with a gasp and a sputter. Before that I’d been a (para)paralegal, a telephone operator, a line cook, a dish washer, and, very briefly, an 11th grade English teacher. I used to tell people that we were aiming to explore our ambivale

What is the name of your business and when was it started? John Howell for Books started on January 1, 2005. Where are you located? Los Angeles, California. We live in a National Historical Landmark Property called the Village Green. If one were traveling West on the 10 Freeway from downtown, one would take the La Brea South Exit. East of Culver City and North of Baldwin Hills. People living Downtown, Hollywood, or points north and east think of the area as “On the way to LAX

Hi, Folks! We are White Unicorn Books. We are DeWayne (De) and Joan White of Dallas, Texas. We married in 1995 but we had know each other all our lives. De brought a mother and 20,000 books into the marriage. I brought a mother, a couple of sisters, five children, many grandchildren, many, many great grandchildren, and several thousand other relatives De had not seen in a long time. My favorite tale is when we sent out our wedding invitations. We used a picture of us when we

I started as a book dealer quite by accident back in the 1980s. As a collector of photography and other interesting item from Automobiles (Thunderbirds) to you name it I’ve have collected it. I have always had a passion for photography starting at an early age taking photos of what I thought was a good shot ( then finding out later it wasn’t) I don’t stand behind the camera anymore. I’ve been a collector of photography and art starting full force around 1988. Now getting back

All of my life I have been a book collector and all of my adult life I wanted to open a second hand bookshop. I settled for school librarian and continued collecting and started a mail order catalogue which worked well for 15 years. I left my job and started selling books through markets and also a stall in a mixed antique business. I decided at the age of 60 that if I didn’t open a shop very soon it would be too late and started looking for premises. After several fruitless

In the quiet darkness of a late fall night, circa 1923, my grandfather Charlie and his family packed their belongings and quietly left Birmingham, England. Times were not good in Birmingham for union organizers and efforts to bring a reasonable standard of living to the bakers there came at a very high price. Charlie and family moved to Glasgow, Scotland. The small used bookshop that he started there was stacked to ceiling with dusty shelves which held a mixture of magazines,

Tell us a little about yourself. Bookselling is my second career. As a ’74 graduate of the US Coast Guard Academy, I spent the first 23 years of my professional life as a “Coastie.” In the mid-80s, I discovered collecting first editions, Charles Dickens specifically. Knowing that someday I would be pursuing something other than Search & Rescue as a career, I looked at antiquarian bookselling as a possible pursuit. I established the business in 1989, home-based, and found I en