How Haerer Rare and Wonderful Books Got Started

Circa 2005, I sat at my desk scrolling through eBay after finishing some homework as a first-year graduate student. My stipend barely paid the rent, and I was eager to find a way to make some extra cash. As a dedicated bass fisherman, spending hours upon hours on the famed Susquehanna River, a smallmouth haven, I noticed a shift in the lure market, with baits from the Japanese domestic market (JDM) quickly gaining popularity and selling for as much as ten times more than traditional baits. So, I began targeting bulk lots of JDM lures. I still remember the reaction I got from some of my classmates when I mentioned spending hundreds of dollars on about 50 baits from the likes of Lucky Craft, Megabass, Jackall, and others. Admittedly, that month, I ate a lot of ten-cent Ramen noodles, but when all was said and done, I more than doubled my money. That was all it took. That was the launch point for my love of treasure hunting, of sorts, and for my entrepreneurial wheels to start turning.  

Over the next decade plus, I expanded from fishing lures to various collectibles. However, after starting a family, my sales activity slowed. The time for sourcing, listing, shipping, etc., simply became challenging to find. Plus, many of the JDM companies that had so long helped sustain my business established themselves in the US, driving lure prices down. Then, in 2018, I was unexpectedly thrown a curveball. My wife and I were approached about helping her uncle catalog and sell his book collection to pay for his long-term care following a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease and advanced dementia. He was a long-time member of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America, and his collecting interests largely aligned with our general interests, with a primary focus on angling books, followed closely by titles about hunting/shooting, New England, travel/exploration/mountaineering, and other topics. He had never catalogued his books. In fact, the only documentation of the collection, incomplete at best, was via typewriter. Moreover, we had zero experience describing, conditioning, valuing, or selling first-edition books. In reality, we had no idea what we were getting into—we didn’t even know what ‘antiquarian’ meant, exactly. Still, sight unseen, we said yes, stepping through the looking glass into an unexpected chapter of our lives. 

After some planning, we rented a box truck and made the trip from our home in western Massachusetts north into Vermont to start migrating the collection. As we stepped into the house, down the rabbit hole, our eyes collectively widened in surprise. There were boxes everywhere, with small paths leading from room to room. Generally, boxes were stacked 4 or 5 high, forming a virtual maize of material. We spent a full afternoon packing boxes, padding books, and loading the truck. We didn’t even have time to open what was in front of us. By the middle of the next morning, I realized that we were rapidly approaching the load capacity of the truck. With mixed excitement and trepidation, we made the return trek, white knuckling the downhill stretches of snow-covered dirt roads as we got close to home. Two months later, we returned for the rest of the books.

For the next year, we lived among books. They lined the walls of our bedroom, dining room, office, hallway, and just about anywhere we could keep them. Many boxes ended up at my mother-in-law’s home, just down the road. In that year, we cataloged some 8,000 books in our spare time—mainly in the evening after the kids were in bed and on weekends when the kids were with grandma—although not without some periods of burn-out sprinkled in. It was a true treasure hunt as we lifted the lid from each uncatalogued box. Many were not terribly exciting, and at times, the sorting of common, low-value books felt overwhelming and almost unimportant. However, those feelings were quickly dashed by the sight of a slip case housing a limited edition or the strike of a rare first edition. A few booksellers who knew about our situation were willing to help us to varying degrees along the way, and one, in particular, not only provided an invaluable level of support but also became a dear friend.  By late 2019 into early 2020, we were meeting with Sotheby’s to sell the rarest of the rare, followed by Doyle to help sell large quantities of books, providing a cushion for the uncle’s care. We also began listing on eBay, although generally, the going was slow. Then came the pandemic. Suddenly, online sales tripled. It turns out that all those people sitting at home needed to find ways to kill time. With the subsequent announcement of pandemic stimulus checks, we expanded from a mere 30 online listings to 300. That gave us the kickstart and confidence needed to really get rolling. We continued to expand our listings, and in some months, I would venture that we were shipping more books out of our dining room than many large booksellers were from their long-established stores. Of course, given the law of averages, those were offset by some months with single-digit sales, too. 

By mid-2022, Parkinson’s had compounded and run its course, and at the end of the year, we sat wondering what to do next. The thought of just sending everything to auction came to mind, and we fielded a number of inquiries about the remainder of the collection. However, we had put so much time and effort into the books that it was hard to imagine that component of our lives being gone. Not only that, I realized that I didn’t want our project, for lack of a better word, to end. It was a conversation with our bookselling confidant that pushed us over the hump—“you may not think about it this way”, she said, “but you have become booksellers.” The next day, we penned a letter to the family and made an offer to buy the business outright. To our delight, they said yes.

At the start of 2023, we made the business our own, transferring the name to Haerer Rare and Wonderful Books. First, we started anew on eBay, which was a challenging transition, as we saw our feedback score of over five hundred drop to zero. Then, we built a dedicated space filled with shelves and cases. Eventually, we launched a website. Shortly after, we found ourselves actively buying books. It was a whirlwind that was years in the making. Today, we find ourselves carrying the torch of sporting booksellers–feeling both established and new simultaneously, depending on the day. Our story continues to evolve as we continuously learn and grow, seeking to find the perfect books for our customers. We hope you find something you like!