A wry, unvarnished chronicle of a career in the rare book trade—now in paperback


When Gary Goodman wandered into a run-down, used-book shop that was going out of business in East St. Paul in 1982, he had no idea the visit would change his life. He walked in as a psychiatric counselor and walked out as the store’s new owner. In The Last Bookseller Goodman describes his sometimes desperate, sometimes hilarious career as a used and rare book dealer in Minnesota—the early struggles, the travels to estate sales and book fairs, the remarkable finds, and the bibliophiles, forgers, book thieves, and book hoarders he met along the way.

Here we meet the infamous St. Paul Book Bandit, Stephen Blumberg, who stole 24,000 rare books worth more than fifty million dollars; John Jenkins, the Texas rare book dealer who (probably) was murdered while standing in the middle of the Colorado River; and the eccentric Melvin McCosh, who filled his dilapidated Lake Minnetonka mansion with half a million books. In 1990, with a couple of partners, Goodman opened St. Croix Antiquarian Books in Stillwater, one of the Twin Cities region’s most venerable bookshops until it closed in 2017. This store became so successful and inspired so many other booksellers to move to town that Richard Booth, founder of the “book town” movement in Hay-on-Wye in Wales, declared Stillwater the First Book Town in North America.

The internet changed the book business forever, and Goodman details how, after 2000, the internet made stores like his obsolete. In the 1990s, the Twin Cities had nearly fifty secondhand bookshops; today, there are fewer than ten. As both a memoir and a history of booksellers and book scouts, criminals and collectors, The Last Bookseller offers an ultimately poignant account of the used and rare book business during its final Golden Age.

A direct descendant of a tenth-century Viking marauder traces his lineage from medieval Iceland to the Dakota plains

Gary Goodman first heard that his 24x great-grandfather was a tenth-century Viking pirate and mercenary at a family reunion, when a cousin told him that they were the direct descendants of an Icelandic poet and cold-blooded killer named Egil Skallagrímsson. Also known as “Egil the Bastard,” Goodman’s ancestor was the subject of Egil’s Saga, one of the great Icelandic epics of the early Middle Ages. Spurred by this revelation of his family’s lineage, Goodman set out to discover the route his forefathers had traveled from medieval Iceland to the North Dakota plains in the later 1800s.

Drawing on Egil’s Saga, family records, and travels through Iceland, England, and Ireland, Goodman traces his ancestral line from Iceland—the family’s homeland for over a thousand years until a volcanic eruption forced them to migrate—to the hardscrabble plains of the Dakota Territory. His panoramic view ranges from the Viking invasion of England in the early Middle Ages to the disappearance of a short-lived Icelandic settlement on the Mouse River in North Dakota in the late 1800s. Along the way, Goodman sketches the highlights of Egil’s Saga, making the centuries-old epic accessible to today’s readers.

With candor, dry wit, and some bemusement, Goodman shares his trip through history from the perspective of a descendant of an original Viking marauder. An innovative, time-bending family history, Longships and Sod Houses is a noteworthy saga in its own right.

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.