7 must-read books about books.

Gary Goodman helped set up Stillwater, Minn., as one other “e book city,” one intentionally modeled on the celebrated Welsh unique, Hay-on-Wye. In Goodman’s witty, self-deprecating account of impulsively shopping for a crummy used bookstore, step by step enhancing its inventory, and finally assembly notable fellow sellers right here and overseas (together with McMurtry and Hay’s “King” Richard Sales space), his tone periodically grows elegiac. In Goodman’s view, the Web has just about destroyed the old-time used e book enterprise. Much more glumly, he affirms McMurtry’s dire observation, “I don’t suppose we’ve a studying tradition anymore.” I used to be despatched a complicated proof of “The Final Bookseller” — due out in November — and extremely advocate it, partly for Goodman’s portrait of a misplaced world, but in addition for its colourful dramatis personae. Goodman as soon as knew a e book scout — the biblio-equivalent of an antiques picker — who “was thus far off the grid he lived within the woods below a tarp.”