The better you knew Gary McGrath, the better the stories he told you. In the last lap of a useful life, he ran the Book Farm in Henniker with his wife Melinda. As a connoisseur of used-book shops, I can tell you they made it one of the best.
Gary died of lymphoma last month at the age of 67. When I dropped in to the Book Farm during the fall, he seemed robust and had his eye on the future.
To get to the shop, you turn off Route 202 at the blinking light just east of the exit into town. A one-story building, the Book Farm sits on a shelf of land along Old West Hopkinton Road. Red barnboard covers the outer walls beneath a gabled roof, and the signage out front pays homage to Walter Robinson, the store’s founder and longtime proprietor.
The shop began as a neat and well-ordered enterprise. Even as Walter aged, it remained a dusty and somewhat disheveled haven for book lovers. Although the books were shelved by genre, you never knew what you might find where. In part, this reflected Walter’s addiction to reading the books, often while sipping sherry, which he freely shared with customers. Over the front desk dangled a plastic spider. As he told anyone who asked, “Every bookstore needs a spider.”
In time, Gary began to help Walter with the business. Sometimes the two of them sorted the large book collections that came Walter’s way. In an adventuresome career, Gary had worked as a scientist, a biology professor at New England College, an academic dean, a college administrator, and an international business consultant. He and Melinda bought the Book Farm in 2005.
With her help, he never stopped making it better. The McGraths’ knowledge of the literary world led to a careful arrangement of the books. A woodstove warmed the shop, as it had in Robinson’s time. Nearby stood comfortable chairs in which to sink while sampling the wares. As far as I know, Gary and Melinda did not serve sherry, but the coffee was free and always fresh.
The business was mainly a retirement-income enhancer for the McGraths. When internet commerce threatened it, their son Sean helped them set up the bookselling website that saved it.
Gary was so detail-oriented that he removed bookmarks and slips of paper from between the pages of the books he bought. I know this because before my wife Monique and I moved to a tiny New York apartment a few years ago, we sold Gary hundreds of books. When we returned three years later, he seemed to know me better because of the baseball and theater ticket stubs I had used for bookmarks.
Years ago, when Gary was helping Walter, they discovered that a man who sold a load of books apparently liked to take nude photographs of women, especially his wife. The two men paged through the books removing and destroying the evidence.
On our visit to the Book Farm last fall, Gary gave us a tour of his latest project. He walked us up the wooden steps to the attic, a long room without internal walls. At first glance, I got the sense I was looking down the deck of a boat from stern to bow. Gary was converting the attic from a storage area to a fiction trove. Clearly an accomplished carpenter, he had used his muscle and ingenuity to maximize shelf space. He had installed back-to-back bookcases down the center of the room and attached hinged shelves for novels to the cases of duplicate stock along the walls.
Gary and I shared a love of history as well as books. The source material for one of my writing projects included a soldier’s Battle of the Bulge diary. When I told Gary this, he took me to shelves straining under thick tomes about World War II. Three minutes later, I had my own bulge – more books about the battle than I could carry.
Gary’s best stories were about special books. One time he found an old book by Walt Whitman in a collection he bought. If memory serves, it was a first edition of Specimen Days, published in 1882. My hands shook when I read the inscription inside. Whitman had signed the book to the firefighters of Camden, N.J. It was in Camden that he used donations from friends to finance a sturdy mausoleum for himself. Years ago, Monique and I made a pilgrimage to it.
Gary eventually found a buyer for the book, but the last such tale he told me concerned a book he swore he’d never sell. Until I heard him out, this struck me as an astonishing admission from a man who had parted with a signed Whitman first edition.
In a box of books Gary bought, he found a beat-up copy of One Man’s Meat, a 1942 collection of Maine essays by E.B. White. It had no dust cover, but, as always, he opened it to look for anything left behind by previous owners. Taped to the endpaper inside the front cover he found a sheet bearing the last name of a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy. The name was Jaeger. Gary lifted the sheet to see the other side. There he discovered a kind response from White to a fan letter Jaeger had written him from the Pacific Theater.
Gary set out to learn what he could about Jaeger. Luckily for him, although White received 30,000 fan letters a year, it turned out they were archived. Because White’s response to Jaeger in Gary’s book was dated, an archivist was able to find his letter and send Gary a copy.
And with that, the story was complete. He had finally found a book he couldn’t let go.
Gary McGrath was many things in life, family man, teacher, world traveler, and businessman, but I knew him only as an easy-going and fair-minded bookseller. He let me hold the Whitman book several times before he sold it. Had I seen him again once the COVID-19 lockdown ended, he would surely have given me another peek at One Man’s Meat and Lieutenant Jaeger’s letter.
Having known Gary, I’m certain he’d also have had another good story to share.
(Mike Pride is editor emeritus of the Monitor and retired administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes.)