Word: starrs
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...Starr grew up in Medford, one of four boys in a family of seven. Two of the brothers are now booksellers. A few years after Mr. Starr took him into the business, his brother started his own store in Boston, and two are surgeons. Mr. Starr's father and grandfather were both book-binders. "Maybe that's how I got into this business," he muses...
...Starr founded the Starr Book Shop forty years ago, in the store space that now houses Cahaly's. That makes his shop the oldest one of its kind in Cambridge. Eighteen years ago, he moved to his present location in the Lampoon castle, where he maintains friendly relations with his neighbors. "They buy humor books here," he says. "And they invite me to their parties. Yeah, I go," he adds...
From virtually nothing, Mr. Starr has built up a business that caters to libraries and collectors around the world. He picks up a fist-full of order forms from his cluttered desk and waves them at me. "See, this one's from Germany," he says. "And these are all from Canada." Many of his customers are people who have seen the catalogue he sends out, or who've heard of him through the trade journals. But he also makes a lot of contacts through visiting professors who come to Harvard from other countries. That's one reason he thinks. Cambridge...
...addition to his mail-order work (that's what he does all day,, when he's sitting at that desk), Mr. Starr does a thriving off-the-street business. That accounts for about half his sales, he estimates. For forty years Harvard students have bought his books. Bate, Alfred, Perry Miller--they were all his customers as undergraduates. He remarks that students used to buy more books than they do now-- "not what they needed in their courses, just what they wanted to own." He gets a lot of outsiders, too, many of them attracted by the unusual building. During...
...Starr has taught himself to be an expert on rare and expensive books. "Everything you learn is by mistakes that you make," he says. "I could write a book on the things I've given away at low prices." He tells one story about the time his brother sold a William Blake book to a Harvard student. Inside was a piece of paper that said simply. "There will be a sale of William Blake prints on Wednesday." "Can I keep this?" asked the student, and his brother said, "Sure." The piece of paper, which had a watermark date...