Roger Carlson spends his day surrounded by 50,000 books, but he has trouble finishing just one.
“There are too many good books,” said Carlson, the white-haired owner of Bookman’s Alley. “More often than not, I’m 20 pages into this one and 50 pages into that one, 20 more into this one and finally I’ve got a pile like this” – gesturing to a tower of books stacked like Jenga blocks on his desk – “or by my bed at home or by my chair and I think, ‘Oh hell.’ “
Still, Carlson, 80, has finished more than a few books in his lifetime. Calling his reading list extensive would be a gross understatement.
“He was always a voracious reader,” said Carlson’s daughter, Susan Carlson, who helps out at the store. “When he was a kid, he would stuff a blanket under his bedroom door so (his parents) wouldn’t see the lights and stay up and read.”
The result, in the alley between Design Within Reach and Saville Flowers on Sherman Avenue, is part bookstore, part museum, part Old Curiosity Shop.
Bookshelves conceal nearly every inch of available wall space, with names like Joyce, Tolstoy and Dickens mingling with essay collections on cubism and architecture.
“What’s for sale is really based on what his preference is and what he thinks other people will buy,” Susan said. “Dad loves the more obscure.”
Carlson opened a fledgling version of Bookman’s Alley in his Deerfield, Ill., living room in 1978 after he decided 25 years of selling ad space was enough.
Working for Fortune magazine, “most of the people I called on thought that the Sheriff of Nottingham was the hero of ‘Robin Hood,’ ” Carlson said. “That wasn’t the way I read the book.”
Two years later, he cashed in his still-living wife’s life insurance policy and set up shop in Evanston.
Since then, Bookman’s has become a windowless maze stuffed with Americana: propaganda posters from World War II, decaying civil service uniforms and the occasional autograph from Old Hollywood movie stars.
“I wanted it to attract the eyes, and I wanted to be comfortable here if I was going to spend so much time here,” said Carlson, a self-described “stuff-buyer.” “And I thought if it looked less like an old-fashioned used-book shop and more like home, even a home that needed dusting, it’d be a start.”
The location is 100 feet from one of the busiest sidewalks in Evanston, but it’s off the beaten path in a good way, Carlson said.
“It meant that I wouldn’t have in-and-out traffic all day long of people who didn’t give a damn about books,” he said. “I would have had to wait on them, and this pretty much limited visitors to people who sought me out because they were interested in books.”
Carlson has such faith in the customers who do seek him out that he lets them pay for books with nothing but the promise of a check in the mail – even if they want to buy the first edition of “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” with its four-figure price tag.
“It works 99 percent of the time,” he said. “If they aren’t wearing a mask or flashing a gun, I pretty much accept that as evidence that they’ll pay.”
Sometimes it doesn’t work out. A British dealer never paid him for a $2,500 book signed by “Sherlock Holmes” author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
“I got over that problem of loss and worrying about it,” Carlson said. “I ascribe my willingness to let it go to my will to keep eating.”
