Book Tours: Bobby Minelli of Household Books

October 5, 2023

Literature

Interviews

Nesha Ruther

Writer at Bond & Grace

If you ask many rare book collectors how they began collecting, their story follows a similar pattern. They had long harbored a passion for books, but it wasn’t until later in life when they had become established in their careers, that they had the time, money, and resources to dedicate themselves to building their collections. For Bobby Minelli, however, the opposite proved to be true. He came to book collecting with little money and few resources, and from there built not only an impressive collection but an entire career.

The oldest of five children, Bobby was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. In the summer, the family would visit their uncle in Boston and peruse the city’s many bookstores. “As the oldest of five, [bookstores] were like a sanctuary,” he says. “There’s a restroom, there’s air conditioning, all the kids can find something to look at. When we were on vacation, we were all a panicked mess, and we would go into bookstores and immediately calm down.”

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Bobby went to Loyola University in Chicago. After graduating, he and his brother, Mark, moved in together, playing music with friends and trying to make a name for themselves. “We were broke post-college kids and aspiring musicians,” Bobby says. But their love for books continued, and the pair would spend whole days exploring bookstores and spending what little money they had.

One day, while contemplating poverty and discussing, as Bobby puts it, “The Bob Dylan-ism of ‘when ya got nothin, ya got nothing to lose,’” Bobby and Mark realized they really did own practically nothing but their guitars. Being the book devotees that they had always been, they made a list of their 100 favorite books and began hunting down hardback copies of each one.

“Even as a young kid I was aware that being in the presence of a book and consuming the contents of a book were two distinct pleasures,” Bobby says. “As a kid, I would have my reading copy of Goosebumps and then I would get my clean, beautiful, shelf copy. I suppose that was an early expression of the desire to have hardback versions I could point to when people came to visit and say, ‘Look what these books mean to me.’ The opportunity to explain what was on my shelf always really appealed to me.”

As they got older, Bobby and Mark discovered a new interest they could add to music and books: beer. “We were participating in the craft beer explosion post-2008. One way it was possible was that certain states retrofitted their distribution laws so you could distribute your own beer. My buddies and I bought a 1995 Ford Astro, took the seats out, and would put the beer in it and take it places. While I was driving my beer around the city, I would stop at every Half Price Books, every thrift store, and antique store that I knew had good books.”

It reached the point where Bobby was so familiar with Chicago’s secondhand booksellers that the owners would call him if he didn’t show up for a week to make sure he was okay. “I even made a pin map [of local bookstores],” he says. “I had a map with Lake Michigan on the side and then pinned all the bookstores within 60 miles.” During this period, Bobby averaged about 15 bookstore visits per week, the stuff of dreams for even the most enthusiastic readers.

The Chicago suburbs proved fertile ground for Bobby’s book collecting. The proximity to academia, particularly Northwestern University, meant many locals were educated, well-read, and often donated their books when they decluttered or moved. “I have a first-edition The Sun Also Rises from Half Price Books in Highland Park that I got for $6.99,” Bobby says proudly. “You never knew what you could find there because some professor would bring in their books, and suddenly you would find something that had huge value.”

Bobby was not above a little bribery to get books nobody else wanted. “We would distribute some of our excess beer to employees and managers of local bookstores, and if things were bound for recycling or going to the warehouse, they would let me shop at a discount.” Over time, Bobby’s list of one hundred books grew to well over a thousand, and then two thousand, and then three. “I began to amass a pretty impressive collection of books.”

Before long, Bobby’s apartment became the place to be, a welcoming environment for friends and acquaintances in which books and beer were in abundance. “People were like, ‘have you seen that guys’ apartment? It’s full of rare books,’” he recounts.

While Bobby had begun collecting with the simple goal of finding hardback editions of his favorite novels, as his collection grew so did his tactics. “There’s a vocabulary and an instinct that you learn as you collect,” he says. “Eventually, if I went into a bookstore and found a rare Robert Heinlein book that had a particular sun fade, like it had been sitting in somebody's sitting room where the sun was coming in, I could find an Asimov that's similarly faded and know they probably had the same previous owner. And if an owner had one book of great value, they probably had others.”

With greater skill came more niche ambition. “Another thing I started collecting was hard-bound versions of Catcher in the Rye because I thought that cover was so mysterious and strange and beautiful. At the time they weren’t priced as highly as they are now, so I purchased maybe 40 of them. I have a whole Catcher in the Rye shelf, but I’m not planning any assassinations or anything like that,” he says with a laugh.

With the rise of social media and the internet, Bobby was able to share his collection with more than the few friends lucky enough to hang out at his apartment. But it also had catastrophic effects on the local bookstores he had come to love and rely on. “By 2012, the amount of bookstores completely halved. So many had gone out of business you had to drive 40 minutes just to find one,” he says. “I was seeing something that was so beloved by so many people literally vanishing in front of my eyes.”

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Soon after, Bobby left Chicago for a job in Los Angeles. It was there he discovered one of the most revered bookstores in the nation, that had miraculously survived the purge of the previous years. Aptly named, The Last Bookstore remains a community hub and cultural touchstone of the LA Arts scene. “They would have comedians come and do live book reviews, they had music events, they had local public radio. Tourists would come from all over the world with a list of things not to miss in Los Angeles and [The Last Bookstore] would be on the list with Santa Monica Pier and The Hollywood Sign.”

Here was the answer Bobby was looking for: a bookstore that was more than a bookstore, so much more, that it did not fear for its place in the modern world.

“I started to think about how to change the bookstore model so that you didn’t have to sell enough books to pay your rent,” Bobby says. A bookstore that was committed to selling books, but whose survival was not dependent upon it.

“I didn’t dream of proprietorship per se,” Bobby says. “I dreamt of a headquarters where I could make and do cool things with other people who are interested in that.”

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Come back on Saturday for Part 2 of Bobby's Book Tour!

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