Good Times Bookshop Home

The New York Times
NEW YORK, SATURDAY, MARCH 16, 2002
"Where Used Books Never Die"
By DAVID BOUCHIER

SMALL bookstores on Long Island have been struggling to survive for years, overwhelmed by the big chains and the dot-coms. Most modern bookstores are supermarkets, dedicated to the quick processing of ephemeral best sellers with the shelf life of uncooked shrimp. Forty thousand new titles are published every year, which keeps the big booksellers busy. But what happens to these glossy new books when they drop off the best-seller lists and are deleted from the publishers' databases?

There's an old saying that when good Americans die, they go to Paris. When good books die, a lot of them go to the Good Times Bookshop in Port Jefferson.

The owners of Good Times, Michael and Mary Mart, allowed me to hang out in their used-book store for a day and relive my youthful experiences as a bookseller many years ago.

I had forgotten just how interesting and strange a bookseller's life could be. A store full of old books is a slightly mysterious place, like an alchemist's den, where anything might be found. Eccentric characters come up to the counter at the rate of about one a minute, with impossible and sometimes spooky requests.

"Do you have a book about how to become invisible?"

"Where's the section on real magic?"

Questions like these invite smart answers, but the Marts handle them all with grave politeness. They also spend a lot of time buying books, one at a time. Books just walk in through the door, in boxes, plastic bags, suitcases and rucksacks.

"We buy more books every day than we sell," Mr. Mart said. The physical law of the conservation of matter suggests that the small store will therefore explode very soon, and it does give that impression. But dealers in old books can never have too many of them.
Millions of books are lurking in the basements and attics of Long Island, and people clearing out old houses have their imaginations overheated by watching too many episodes of the "Antiques Road Show." Is this tattered paperback of Walt Whitman's poems a priceless first edition? Could this "Complete Works of Shakespeare," stolen from the library long ago, be a first folio from 1623? It certainly looks that old.

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