The King of Skid Row

John Bacich and the Twilight Years of Old Minneapolis

JAMES ELI SHIFFER

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

“Highly recommended, partly for Goodman’s portrait of a lost world, but also for its colorful dramatis personae.”

—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

“At turns poignant, sharp, and laugh-out-loud funny, this memoir walks the fine line between informative and wildly entertaining.”

—Patrick Hicks, author of The Commandant of Lubizec and In the Shadow of Dora

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. 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 meets along the way. The Last Bookseller offers an ultimately poignant account of the used and rare book business during its final Golden Age.

Gary Goodman is a semi-retired rare book dealer who lives in Stillwater, Minnesota. He is coauthor of The Stillwater Booktown Times and The Secret History of Golf in Scotland

MEMOIR

$14.95 Paper ISBN: 978-1-5179-1661-9

$14.95 Retail e-book ISBN: 978-1-4529-6691-5

OCTOBER

200 pages 18 b&w illustrations 5 3/8 x 8 1/4

The story of a much different Minneapolis, through the words and photographs of one of its most colorful characters—now in paperback

“Shiffer vividly evokes the neighborhood at its violent and drunken peak in this vivid and fascinating account of a bygone era.”

—City Pages

“The King of Skid Row makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of urban history in the Midwest.”

—Middle West Review

Following John Bacich, who documented the last days of downtown Minneapolis’s Skid Row neighborhood in the 1950s, The King of Skid Row recreates the violent, alcohol-soaked history of an area of the city now completely redesigned and developed, transformed dramatically from its gritty past.

James Eli Shiffer has been a professional journalist for thirty years and is an editor at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis. In 2010, he partnered with Ewen Media to create Rubbed Out, a multimedia history of the murder of a journalist in Minneapolis in 1945. He was a member of the Star Tribune team whose coverage of the killing of George Floyd and subsequent civil unrest was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news.

MINNESOTA HISTORY

$16.95 Paper ISBN: 978-1-5179-1659-6

$16.95 Retail e-book ISBN: 978-1-4529-5019-8

OCTOBER

192 pages 57 b&w illustrations 2 maps 6 x 8