Inside Circle City, the only bookstore in Pittsboro and probably the only one in its 240-year history, the selections run so deep that the official handbook for Webelos scouting sits shelved beside the complete leather-bound works of Washington Irving, published in 1895.
Within just a few steps, a reader can pick up a signed copy of Neil Gaiman’s “American Gods,” the novelized version of “King Kong” and a century-old children’s classic titled “The Goody-Naughty Book,” with the goody side starting on page one, naughty side beginning at the back.
All day long, customers plop down with obscure favorites and exchange light literary banter with owner Myles Friedman, including the white-haired woman who slid “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” across the counter on Friday.
“I’ve never read that one,” she said, showing a sly grin.
“It’s very ... immoral,” Friedman warned.
She smiled back.
“Oh, I know.”
For 13 years, Friedman has enjoyed consistent success despite a general decline in reading and a refusal to sell books online, which he admits would be lucrative.
“If I wanted to make money, that’s what I’d do,” he said. “I’m not interested in selling a book to a guy in Cleveland I’ve never met. I want to sell a book to a guy like that last guy, who bought “Darkness at Noon” and will come back in a month to tell me how he liked it.
“Selling stuff online is work,” he continued. “Selling stuff in here is a pleasure.”
Friedman says his store would never catch eyeballs along Pittsboro’s busy downtown streets if not for the bookshelf mural his daughter Bailey painted along the entire north wall, which shows volumes from Tar Heel favorites Thomas Wolfe and John Hope Franklin stacked next to each other.
When he came to Chapel Hill for graduate school in 1977, the town had 10 used book stores around Franklin Street. Now it has almost none.
But luckily enough, enough people in UNC’s backyard still want to read Joseph Conrad paperbacks beyond “Heart of Darkness,” or they want to collect everything John Grisham ever wrote, or they delight in poking their nose around the closet-side rooms and pay $5 for cowboy thrillers with titles like, “Death Rides the Night.”
“A little bit for everybody,” said Friedman, affixing a clear dust jacket to a forgotten D.H. Lawrence novel.
In a previous life, Friedman published an all-inclusive guide to spring training baseball games, offering hard-to-find details on schedules and ticket prices. The internet made that information available with a click.
So when the old real estate office on Hillsboro Street came open, he went about the business of starting a book collection, grabbing them up everywhere, assembling 30,000 within three months. The breakthrough came when he approached 2nd Chance Books in Cary on its way out of business and offered to buy the entire catalog if they would shut their doors that day.
“They were afraid they would have to take everything to the dump,” Friedman said. “People call me and ask if they can leave books here. I’m grateful. You never know.”
Friedman will say he doesn’t specialize in any genre, but he clearly relishes the role of hard-to-find book whisperer. One regular holds an annual party at which he hands out signed copies of the same novel, this year’s being — SPOILER ALERT — signed copies of Cormac McCarthy’s last work.
He once spent more than a year tracking down a first-edition of “The Picture of Dorian Gray” for an eager reader. “It’s not even that valuable,” Friedman said, shrugging.
He keeps many of these darlings behind the counter, including:
? a signed copy of Gov. Jim Hunt’s autobiography, addressed to legendary UNC system administrator Bill Friday.
“I can’t even remember where I got this,” he confessed.
? a signed copy of President John F. Kennedy’s “Profiles in Courage,” autographed not by JFK himself, but by his younger brother Teddy, who was recuperating from a skiing accident and gave it to his nurse.
? a boxed, hardback copy of “From Julia Child’s Kitchen,” personalized by the chef herself and her husband Paul, using tidy signatures.
“I’m a snob about signatures,” Friedman said. “I don’t like writers that squiggle. A guy stands in line three hours because he likes your book, it feels like F you.”
Nearing 70, Friedman knows that he is curating a relic, and that one day a younger replacement will come along and hawk titles online.
But for now, he can serve that slice of the population that still wanders into a bookstore like a spice cabinet or a wine shop and wants to talk about the best pairing — a novel in an armchair, a biography on a chaise lounge or a pot-boiler for a long flight.