End of the story South Osborne institution Nerman’s closes book on business after nearly 30 years By: Ben Waldman Posted: 3:51 PM CDT Friday, Mar. 24, 2023 Last Modified: 1:26 PM CDT Sunday, Mar. 26, 2023 Updates

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This article was published 24/03/2023 (1274 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A nine-year-old boy wearing pink sweats was sitting cross-legged in the war section at Nerman’s reading about American submarines, British airplanes and the First World War. In his head, Daniel Charleson travelled back to a terrifying time between the pages of a book his mother would buy him for one dollar.

“I like to read about back in the day,” he said cheerily, wearing a hoodie, which had on its front the face of a cat.

It was Daniel’s first time at Gary Nerman’s bookstore, which for nearly 28 years has stood in South Osborne as a brick-and-mortar icon of literary oddity, a jungle filled with dusty words and the echoes of 100-year-old postcards.

At the end of 2022, there was a library totalling 100,000 books on the shelves. By the time Daniel found himself sitting in the war section on March 22, about half of those books had made their way out of the store to new shelves.

That’s because Nerman’s Books and Collectibles, at 700 Osborne St., is closing down at the end of the day Saturday. Nerman is retiring and every item is for sale for a single dollar.

On the first day of his store’s final sale, Nerman, 68, sold more than 3,000 books. He has sold almost 50,000 since Jan. 3

Used bookselling is a business of accumulation. Like reading, it is a learned skill set, with its practitioners requiring curiosity, passion and encyclopedic command of several different disciplines. The used bookseller is at once an appraiser, a wheeler, a dealer, an accountant, and of course, a salesperson. No algorithm could do all of that.

It takes time, knowledge and practice. For Nerman, the practice began as a private one. As a young boy in West Kildonan, the son of a clothing manufacturing rep devoured pulpy science fiction and pocketbooks about Tarzan and Jane. He would go to Red River Books, which is still around, when it was located on Cumberland Avenue.

“I got into books because I read,” says Nerman, watching a curling match behind the counter to which he will soon say goodbye.

Though the reading never stopped, it was followed by a mercantile postscript. In the 1980s, on an Atari ST, Nerman began selling children’s books. Soon, he opened his first store, which moved a few times before finally settling into South Osborne, a four-minute drive from Nerman’s home.

Over the years, his collection matured and diversified. Within his stacks was one of the city’s most eclectic libraries. Amongst the most well-stocked and -kept sections highlighted local history and how-to-do-things, a nexus of interests that often drew in letterpress artist Sean McLachlan. In McLachlan’s hands on Thursday were two books. One was titled The Complete Book of Heating with Wood, the other was Fabrication of Oxwelded Piping.

Nearby, a  six-foot-tall woman holding a copy of Black Beauty crouched down low to assess the bottom shelf on the wall of poetry.

Josh Stark filled a blue IKEA bag with books by V.C. Andrews and Jackie Collins. Stephanie Arthur grabbed a guide to J.R.R. Tolkien. Sherri Turner held a stack of vintage cabinet cards and a small photo book of the Black Hills of South Dakota.

“If they have a recipe section, then I’m in trouble,” the interior designer said. Right around the corner, the cookbooks awaited.

“How many you got, Jamie?” Nerman asked a customer carrying a stack of magazines to the till. “Twenty-two,” Jamie said. Twenty-two magazines for twenty-two dollars on the twenty-second day of March.

Shortly after, the gentle-voiced owner of Red River Books came in.

“You only have about an hour,” the cashier told him.

“We’re only going to be about 10 minutes.” He told not a word of a lie: he and his employee picked up a box of old arcade magazines Nerman had set aside, and were out the door 11 minutes later.

In the basement, where children’s books dwell, Cyril Coutu, a hardwood floor refinisher, was leafing through the filing cabinets in the magazine room.

“I was here yesterday, too,” Coutu said. “I bought 103 magazines. Today, I have a good 30 or 40.” Among his latest bounty was the February 1938 issue of Picture and the July 1966 edition of the Saturday Evening Post, which hailed cigarette-smoking, scarf-wearing Bob Dylan as the “rebel king of rock ’n’ roll.”

On a shelf at the back rested a stack of Life magazines, topped by one whose cover starred a family of emperor penguins. The specific copy of the magazine was sent to the Pritchard Avenue home of Mr. Roy Ellie on March 22, 1954, 69 years earlier to the day.

On Saturday, Nerman will close his bookstore forever, selling as much as he can before he flips the open sign to the other side. He has made thousands of transactions throughout his career, but perhaps the most memorable sale was a book of poems written by a writer who Nerman figured was as obscure as he was.

“I bought that book for $1,” recalls Nerman. “I didn’t know what it was, so I put it on the internet for $10.” Several offers came in, but Nerman had a problem: he’d misplaced it. Soon after, an offer came in for a little bit more: $300. So Nerman started looking harder. “Then we found it, and I researched what it was.”

The book was 1919’s Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics by Clive Hamilton, which turned out to be a pen name used by a world-famous British author for his first published work.

That author went on to write The Chronicles of Narnia under his given name, C.S. Lewis.

“We sold it for $4,200 (US),” said Nerman, who will turn 69 on his store’s final day. “Pretty good profit from one dollar.”

ben.waldman@freepress.com