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Fall 2004

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The Prince of Pages
Antiquarian bookseller Ken Gloss runs a Boston landmark, and a family legacy.

–Mel Allen




	Brattle Books proprietor Ken Gloss ’73 is America’s best-known seller of used and rare books.

ON A WARM BOSTON MORNING a Chevy Suburban pulls out of a parking garage across from Boston Common. Its driver is Ken Gloss ’73, perhaps America’s best-known and, from his appearances on public television’s hit “Antiques Roadshow,” the most recognizable seller of used and rare books. His bookstore, the Brattle Book Shop, is a Boston landmark, a great cavernous place whose seemingly endless shelves groan with books. Employees guess those shelves hold anywhere from 125,000 to 250,000 volumes. Every week they unload thousands more. Once their boss came home from Tennessee with over 10,000 books devoted to nuclear energy. Stacks of books in the basement often wait weeks, even months, before Ken opens their covers and writes his price. Outside the shop, a sliver of a city lot has become a Boston landmark, packed with books on sale, many going for a buck or two. It’s not unusual for people to drive for several hours to hang out all day looking for bargains.

The Brattle Book Store has been in business since 1825, but its contemporary fame began during George Gloss’s reign from 1949 to 1985, when he ruled his dusty shelves as the king of antiquarian booksellers. Though George has been gone nearly 20 years, his shadow hovers still. Few days pass without some customer reminding Ken that his father, George, was a Boston treasure, a flamboyant character, and “wasn’t he an amazing man?” Ken will say yes, yes, he was, and then he’ll turn back to what he does even better than his father—finding books, selling books, spreading the word about rare books, keeping Brattle Books thriving.

On this morning Ken thumbs through his well-worn Boston atlas, “one of my most valuable books,” while finding his way to a house in South Boston. He is a youthful-looking, trim man, dressed neatly in gray slacks and green-checked shirt, in the casual style of a man who wants to deflect attention from his wardrobe. Today he may find one book, or perhaps a thousand. He calls these regular forays “going on a buy.” He often enters a house that is filled with sorrow—people call him when a loved one dies. He knows a book collection is one of the most intimate mirrors into who we are. He knows the survivors want the books to stay, because they hold memories. They also want them gone, because they hold too many memories.

“When my father died,’ he says, “it took me six months to go through his books. If it hadn’t been my father I could have done it in a day.” He has honed his appraiser’s eye so that he can scan as many as 2,000 books in 20 minutes, plucking the books he wants without hesitation, leaving others, though he knows “they always want me to take everything.”

He tells about the time he went to a house and the woman was disappointed in his offer. She had hoped to be able to repair her roof. “I asked if I could see this one last bookshelf,” Ken relates. “She said there was nothing there.” He smiles. “I found a book of handwritten poems by Robert Frost.” She repaired her roof.

“It’s like being Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island,” he says. “I never know what I’ll find.” The day before Ken had gone to the Cambridge estate of a man who collected decorative arts. He had found a book inscribed by Walt Whitman and made a bid on it. “I’m very competitive,” he admits. “Even if I don’t want a book, I don’t want not to get it. I don’t want someone else to get it.”

He doesn’t expect such a find today. He’d taken a phone call from a recent widow. Her husband had many books; she said he’d been a frequent browser at the shop. Ken felt he owed her the courtesy of a visit. And there is always the chance he’ll spot something.

In South Boston, a sad-faced woman opens the door and shows Ken upstairs to rooms nearly empty except for shelves of books. “Oh, my husband just loved books,” she says.

“Looks like he went to a lot of bookstores,” Ken says softly.

“He lost his battle,” she sighs, and starts to cry a little. “I try to keep myself together. I want to do the right thing.”

She goes to another room for a few moments. “When the books go,” Ken says, “it’s the final thing. Her husband is gone.”

For the next 20 minutes Ken moves from shelf to shelf, room to room. The woman tries to stay out of his way, but she cannot; she needs to talk about the books, needs to talk about her husband. Ken says all the right things, but he also knows too much sentiment does not mix with business. He turns to her. “I can sum it up. Most of these are not sellable.” She is visibly disappointed. “Really?”

“I could pick a couple hundred dollars’ worth,” Ken says, “but most of these we’d have to put on our dollar table. I saw some nice books, but the binding is busted. I want to take everything for you, but there’s not a lot of value. I wish I could pay you more, but $500 is the maximum. I don’t know if that helps you.”

She cries again, softly, and accepts. “I know I can trust you,” she says.

With the offer accepted Ken moves swiftly. He is a precise man, the polar opposite of his father, who lived and worked at home and in the bookshop in a state of semi-controlled chaos, books tumbling here and there. In the back of Ken’s Suburban sit neat stacks of identical flat cardboard boxes. “If they’re all the same, they stack easier,” Ken says, “and if we fill them with books and stack them a certain way we can fit 75 boxes.” His helper brings the folded boxes inside and breaks the silence with the sharp snap of a tape gun. A back injury has ended Ken’s lifting and carrying days, but his hands are quick. Ninety minutes after he entered the house the Suburban is packed.

“When I leave a house,” Ken says, “I want people to be happy, to be satisfied. She may have a friend with a better library. And I want them to call me one day. If I had just said to her ‘This stuff is junk, I don’t want it,’ that would have been emotionally too hard for her. I think her husband bought a lot of these books from our dollar table. And you know what? They’re just going back to where they started.”

George Gloss and his bride, Dorrit, married in 1949. They used Dorrit’s savings of $500 as a down payment to buy Brattle Books, which after 124 years, was on its last legs. A year later, Ken was born. Family lore has it that his first word was “book.” His earliest memories are going on buys. “I’ve worked since I was 5,” he says. “It wasn’t always my choice to be putting books away, carrying books, waiting on customers. I resented being forced to do it, but I liked the books. A lot of our life together was my father saying, ‘It’s Sunday, we’re going to look at books.’”

Back from the buy in South Boston, Ken is sipping tea in his second floor office. His wife, Joyce Kosofsky, sits at her computer listening to the conversation. She was a student at UMass Amherst with Ken, but they didn’t hook up until a few years after they graduated. A mutual friend brought them together and they married in 1980. She collects books on jazz; and their suburban Boston home holds over 800. Whenever Ken goes on a buy he looks to see if he might surprise her with one more. When Ken finds a book so rare and valuable he knows he must sell it quickly, he will first bring it home so that his wife and two daughters might hold it, even for an evening.

Classical music plays softly in the background. His mother, Dorrit, still calls this tiny office home three mornings a week. “It’s good for her to see people,” Ken says.
George Gloss had a prodigious gift for promoting Brattle Books. Once, he filled a Conestoga wagon with books and tossed them to happy passersby, ignoring the immense traffic jam he was causing—all to promote his move to West Street. He became more famous locally than many of the authors whose books he sold, a man the Boston Globe called “a lively literary landmark in his own right.”

Ken knew growing up that he had to make his own way—that he could not spend his life being known solely as George’s son.

“When I went to college, people said UMass had a good chemistry department, so I figured, okay, I’ll be a chemist,” Ken recalls. “After my senior year I was headed to the University of Wisconsin for grad school. My goal was to work at Woods Hole one day. But my father had suffered a heart attack. I said I’d help out one year.” He pauses. “When you’re in a small family business, it’s tough. I went through a lot of hard times with my father. But I always liked the books…the hard part was that my father’s whole personality was the bookstore. So I come in, here’s my father, books heaped everywhere—he had to literally climb over books to get to his desk—he was disorganized. We’d get calls. ‘We sent a check but we never got the books.’ My father would have taken the check and tucked it away and just forgotten about it.”

Joyce swivels in her chair, raising her eyebrows. “Everyday he would burst into the store at 10 or 11,” she says. He’d jump out of his car in the middle of the street and holler for someone to park his car. He’d come in and bellow ‘Did you do this? Did you do that? Then do it!’ I’d get upset. I’d cry. He fired me twice a week.”

Ken adds, “Oh, I’d get fired too. A lot of times he felt I wasn’t informing him of what I was doing—but he wouldn’t listen. So I’d be fired. I’d go upstairs to the third floor. After a while I’d just walk out the door and go to the movies. After I did this a few times, he fired me less. One of the big values of my degree in chemistry was I knew I could do something else and,” he adds, “my father knew I could do something else. In time I learned how to get along. I knew I had to change things, but I knew I had to somehow make it my father’s idea.

“In 1980 our old store burned to the ground. We lost everything. We rented a building a few doors away—it’s where we are right now. The guy who owned this building wanted to move to California. He told me, ‘If you can do this fast, we’ll do it.’ This was 1983. I knew if I went to my father and said, ‘He’ll pay us to take the building,’ my father still would have said no. I knew he liked his lawyer who had been a customer here since age 9. I called the lawyer up. I told him to get an appraiser in and that Joyce and I would go away on vacation. When I came back my father had this great idea to buy the building.” Ken tells the story with satisfaction. “It’s why we can survive and thrive today,” he says. “Because we own the building.”

He takes his visitor on a tour of the bookshop. To the basement where complete bound volumes of Time and LIFE wait for a buyer, where boxes filled with books reach to the ceiling; to the second floor, where every conceivable category of used book jams the narrow aisles; to the third floor, protected by security codes and bright-eyed employees, where the rarest, most-prized books, many under lock and key, await the right buyer. And finally to the outside lot, where regulars pick through the dollar tables as if they are at a supermarket feeling melons.

“I come alive when I come into the store,” George Gloss told a Wall Street Journal writer in 1976. He would send his wife on vacation without him. “I’m right where I belong,” he’d say. “Why do I want to go anywhere else?”

Now his son is telling his visitor that he knows if he let himself, he could fill 16 hours a day, maybe more, with the books—sorting, pricing. That he loves opening the shop at 6 a.m., sitting in the quiet, opening the boxes, seeing again what he’d found weeks earlier. “I learned a tremendous amount from my father,” Ken says. “I found I could do this 24 hours a day and have a blast,” he says. “ I have to work hard not to do it.”
Joyce meets his eye. “She tells me I only work half a day,” Ken smiles. “Twelve hours.” The visitor asks Joyce what would happen if George Gloss walked in today and saw Brattle Books thriving, saw his son on television, saw his son giving his talks all over New England. She does not hesitate.

“His chest would swell,” she says. “‘My son!’”
http://www.brattlebookshop.com/

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