Meet Greg Gibson, of Ten Pound Island Book Co., a bookseller's "bookman"

Greg Gibson established Ten Pound Island Book Company in Gloucester, MA in 1976. Greg's nearly 50 years of bookselling experience includes operating a series of open shops, traveling the country to antiquarian book fairs, cataloguing rare books and ephemera, writing a blog: "Bookman's Log", while also researching and writing a handful of books. Ten Pound Island specializes in maritime history, yachting, whaling, U.S. coastal history, New England, lighthouses, logs, navigation, and charts. He's been a member of the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America (ABAA) since 1986.

Greg got started in the book business while working on the Gloucester waterfront. He was offered a small space to display and sell books and in just two weeks, he realized he had found his life's work. Over the years, Greg operated bookshops in a number of locations until 1993 when he chose to limit his bookselling to in-person sales by appointment, sales at book fairs, online at tenpound.com, biblio.com, ABAA, & mail orders. He asserts: "A bookseller's customers are our best teachers...Coming up in the trade, seafaring book customers taught me (over and over again) about maritime books and ephemera...They sent me down this road," Greg says. Today, he is the person to talk to for answers to questions about maritime books and ephemera.

Flash forward to 2024: Greg's just purchased the inventory of another long-established book dealer - a collection of 10,000 books that "haven't seen the light of day" in decades, he said, including literature, art, Americana, and travel. Ten Pound Island also has recently bought a large collection of books on the War of 1812 from the estate of a deceased customer.

Greg claims to have slowed down a bit since his college days, when he did a book fair almost every week. At 79 years of age, he's still actively buying, cataloguing, and selling books - exhibiting at five book shows in six weeks this fall. Look for a sampling of his rare books and ephemera, from his recent purchases and back stock, at the Ten Pound Island Book Company's booth at the Northampton Book Fair on November 22nd and 23rd at the Northampton Community Arts Trust, 33 Hawley Street.

If you've never read Greg's advice to up and coming booksellers, read his talk "Don't Do It" delivered to the Class of 2009 at the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminars. In that talk, Greg said, "I have been driven from pillar to post by a chaotic marketplace, itself driven by technological and economic forces that I am powerless to alter or withstand. I have “evolved” from being a gentlemanly practitioner of a civilized trade – a man who served his community from a place on its main street – to a marginalized, obsolescent outcast, a desperate survivor of a bygone world. While I sometimes see myself as a wily small mammal dodging my way among dinosaur legs, I feel more often like an Indian on his pony on the ridge, looking down at the Iron Horse steaming through his hunting grounds, wondering where all the buffalo have gone."

To learn more about Greg Gibson's history in the book business, see the interview with bookseller Michael Ginsberg