First Person Singular: Rare Bookseller Brian Cassidy

“In a room full of established book dealers, I'm always the youngest by at least 20 years. But that can be good for business. If you talk to older book dealers, you'll often hear them lament there are no young collectors. That is just not true. It's just that the new collectors are buying things that are different than what's even on the radar of most book dealers.”

“My best find? I bought something for $20 and sold it for $10,000. That's really all I want to say, because I bought it from another dealer who just didn't know what exactly he was holding onto. I can't blame him: It just wasn't obvious. I spent a year -- a year -- of solid research to verify it was actually what I thought it might be. But I think he'd rather not know.”

“I originally set out to be a poet. I thought I'd be a tenured professor, writing a couple of books a year. But all the things I loved about academia -- the research, digging into the nooks and crannies of history and literature -- it's all still here. This is what I've always loved.”

>>> Snippets from an interview by Amanda Long “First Person Singular: Rare Bookseller Brian Cassidy”, published in The Washington Post