“Fair enough,” said Bruce. He left, promising to return, but got sidetracked by an idea for a road trip. Three days later he said good-bye to the girl and drove to Jacksonville to shop for a new car. He coveted a sparkling-new Porsche 911 Carrera, and the fact that he could simply write a check for one made the temptation painful. He stood his ground, though, and after a long day of horse-trading he surrendered his well-used Jeep Cherokee for a brand-new one. He might need the space to haul things. The Porsche could always wait, perhaps until he’d earned the money to buy one.
With a new set of wheels, and money in the bank, Bruce left Florida for a literary adventure that he anticipated more with each passing mile. He had no itinerary. He headed west, and planned to one day turn north at the Pacific, then back east, then south. Time meant nothing; there were no deadlines. He searched for independent bookstores, and when he found one he decamped for a day or two of browsing, drinking coffee, reading, maybe even lunch if the place had a café. He usually managed to corner the owners and gently poke around for information. He told them he was thinking about buying a bookstore and, frankly, needed their advice. The responses varied. Most seemed to enjoy their work, even those who were wary of the future. There was great uncertainty in the business, with the chains expanding and the Internet filled with unknowns. There were horror stories of established bookshops driven out of business when large discount stores popped up just down the street. Some of the independents, especially those in college towns too small for the chains, appeared to be thriving. Others, even in cities, were practically deserted. A few were new and enthusiastically bucking the trend. The advice was inconsistent and wide-ranging, from the standard “Retail is brutal” to “Go for it, you’re only twenty-three years old.” But the one constant was that those giving advice enjoyed what they were doing. They loved books, and literature, and writers, the whole publishing scene, and they were willing to put in long hours and deal with customers because they considered theirs to be a noble calling.
For two months, Bruce drifted across the country, zigzagging aimlessly in pursuit of the next independent bookstore. The owner in one town might know three others across the state, and so on. Bruce consumed gallons of strong coffee, hung out with authors on tour, bought dozens of autographed books, slept in cheap motels, occasionally with another bookworm he’d just met, spent hours with booksellers willing to share their knowledge and advice, sipped a lot of bad wine at signings where only a handful of customers showed up, took hundreds of interior and exterior photographs, took pages of notes, and kept a log. By the time his adventure was over, and he was finished and tired of driving, he had covered almost eight thousand miles in seventy-four days and visited sixty-one independent bookstores, no two even remotely similar. He thought he had a plan.
He returned to Camino Island and found Tim where he’d left him, at the coffee bar, sipping espresso and reading a newspaper, looking even more haggard than before. At first, Tim did not remember him, but then Bruce said, “I was thinking about buying the store a couple of months ago. You were asking one-fifty.”
“Sure,” Tim said, perking up only slightly. “You find the money?”
“Some of it. I’ll write a check today for a hundred thousand, and twenty-five grand a year from now.”
“Nice, but that’s twenty-five short, the way I count.”
“That’s all I have, Tim. Take it or leave it. I’ve found another store on the market.”
Tim thought for a second, then slowly shoved forward his right hand. They shook on the deal. Tim called his lawyer and told him to speed things along. Three days later the paperwork was signed and the money changed hands. Bruce closed the store for a month for renovations, and used the downtime for a crash course on bookselling. Tim was happy to hang around and share his knowledge on every aspect of the trade, as well as the gossip on customers and most of the other downtown merchants. He had a lot of opinions on most matters, and after a couple of weeks Bruce was ready for him to leave.
On August 1, 1996, the store reopened with as much fanfare as Bruce could possibly drum up. A nice crowd sipped champagne and beer and listened to reggae and jazz while Bruce relished the moment. His grand adventure had been launched, and Bay Books—New and Rare was in business.
2.
His interest in rare books was accidental. Upon hearing the awful news that his father had dropped dead of a heart attack, Bruce went home to Atlanta. It wasn’t really his home—he’d never spent much time there—but rather the current and last home of his father, a man who moved often and usually with a frightening woman in tow. Mr. Cable had married twice, and badly, and had sworn off the institution, but he couldn’t seem to exist without the presence of some wretched woman to complicate his life. They were attracted to him because of his apparent wealth, but over time each had realized he was hopelessly scarred by two horrific divorces. Luckily, at least for Bruce, the latest girlfriend had just moved out and the place was free from prying eyes and hands.
Until Bruce arrived. The house, a baffling, cutting-edge pile of steel and glass in a hip section of downtown, had a large studio on the third level where Mr. Cable liked to paint when he wasn’t investing. He had never really pursued a career, and since he lived off his inheritance he had always referred to himself as an “investor.” Later, he’d turned to painting, but his oils were so dreadful that he’d been shooed away from every gallery in Atlanta. One wall of the studio was covered with books, hundreds of them, and at first Bruce hardly noticed the collection. He assumed they were just window dressing, another part of the act, another lame effort by his father to seem deep, complicated, and well read. But upon closer observation, Bruce realized that two shelves held some older books with familiar titles. He began pulling them off the upper shelf, one by one, and examining them. His casual curiosity quickly turned to something else.
The books were all first editions, some autographed by the authors. Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, published in 1961; Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948); John Updike’s Rabbit, Run (1960); Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952); Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer (1961); Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus (1959); William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967); Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1929); Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1965); and J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951).