A wooden sign with chipped paint from its nearly 45 years of weathering still stands tall outside the bookery as a clear display of the business.
A door opens up to a land of organized chaos; you can hear the floorboards creak underneath your feet as you maneuver through the several-feet-high stacks of books and tall bookshelves.
The French edition of Filson’s “History of Kentucky,” 1785, is proudly showcased on a high shelf against the wall on the first floor, while some classics such as “Peter Rabbit” sit more insignificantly at an arm’s length away in the room upstairs.
All of these “treasures” make the days of John Glover’s semi-retired life much more fulfilling when they are spent at Glover’s Bookery.
The 72-year-old started his rare and used bookstore in Lexington after a partial time in graduate school for anthropology and archaeology at the University of Kentucky.
“My major professor took a sabbatical for a year, and I came home and told Carrie (his late wife) that, ‘OK, I think I’m going to stay out of grad school for a year while he’s gone and try this book store thing,’” Glover said. “Two or three days later, when she started talking to me again, we decided to do it,” he said jokingly.
He never ended up going back to graduate school and has remained in the antiquarian book business ever since.
Glover started his business in 1976, and it was called “Antiques and Books,” located on the corner of Martin Luther King Blvd. and Third Street. Now at his fourth shop location, Glover’s Bookery is located off South Broadway near the Virginia Avenue intersection. He said he bought the place he’s at now in 1980 and has been there ever since.
Glover noted that book collecting in a sense, is very much like archaeology. With archaeology you are excavating layers of the earth, he said, and with books you also have layers of history.
“It was like a treasure hunt every day,” he said. “If a really great old book comes in the door, it burns my fingers. I’m really excited.”
He said his shop has been here for so long that it’s become a Kentucky footprint for old books.
“I’ve always had a love of old books — that goes all the way back to my dad reading to me from his old Tom Swifts, which were juvenile adventure stories,” Glover said.
He said he didn’t necessarily grow up with the average children’s picture book, but instead his dad “would sit there with this really old book and read me this fantastic story, and I think that’s where the thing for old books started.”
Glover said that was something he always remembered, crediting his dad for the passion to start this business.
History of Glover’s Bookery
Glover said he and his late wife loved to go to country auctions and look for antiques to furnish their home with and he noticed there were always boxes filled with books, so he decided to start selling them.
Glover said his store is one of two true rare and used bookstores in Lexington, with five in the state of Kentucky.
“This is just something that you do for love, and that’s why I’m still here,” he said.
Glover opened his bookstore nearly 50 years ago with his late wife, Carrie, who passed away from cancer. He then met his second wife, Anne, in the bookstore when she came in one day to try to sell him some books.
He said when Anne came in they started talking, and before he knew it they had been there for an hour or two. Her second visit, she looked around and bought a few books, then once again left. Glover said his manager at the time pointed out to him that the young lady was flirting with him.
Glover’s manager said she paid him with her emergency check, a check that had been crumpled up, sitting in her wallet for an extended amount of time. He told Glover she did that because she wanted him to have her name. Glover reflected now that his manager must have been right.
“Seems like two or three days later she comes back in to look around and she buys a box full of books and I take it back to the parking lot for her. And while I’m talking to her at her car, I ask her ‘are you hungry’ — second wife,” Glover said.
The two went to Jalapeño’s for Mexican food on what Glover claims was their first date, but Anne said it was when he asked her out the following weekend, because that’s the one she had to get all dressed up for.
They have now been married for 10 years.
Air Force
Before his bookstore days, Glover was in the Air Force working as a veterinary technician with military dogs.
“I came to UK out of the service — on the GI Bill,” he said. “I’m from a military family, so it was something we were supposed to do, and I did it.”
He said his experiences with the military were great; he enjoyed the several responsibilities his job required, including working with military dogs and food inspection.
Glover was raised in Fort Walton Beach, Florida, and he thought the military would allow him to travel elsewhere.
“You know what they did? Sent me back to Florida. I spent my whole military (career) in south Florida, Homestead Air Force Base,” he said.
Glover said people today would not believe how many missiles were pointed at Cuba back then. He said many of these missile sites were small and out in the Everglades.
“They were all patrolled by military working dogs with MPs (military police), and that’s very tropical, and so those dogs needed constant care,” he said. “So, we had a route that we would take going out, checking on the dogs. Of course, we had the clinic, and most folks don’t know that the veterinary corps in the Air Force also does all the food inspection (for the military base).”
During the last two years of his service, he said all the meat that came on base had to go through him, which he noted was a fun aspect of the job.
Making the bookstore a business
Glover said he used to attend many auctions to find books but got tired of sitting around at them all day. Once his bookstore was established, he would constantly receive calls from estates, people moving and some of his customers wanting to sell parts of their collections.
He said now, it is a lot of him sitting in the shop, and when the phone rings he will go to people’s houses and look at their books.
“Some bookstores won’t go to where the books are, we do,” Glover said. “I love going out and talking to them, tell(ing) them about their books, buying some and that type of thing.”
There are two aspects of the business that make it great to him — “finding treasures, finding good rare books and then finding a home for them; finding a collector or reader who wants that,” he said.
Glover said he finds homes for orphan books, cleaning them up and finding someone who cares about them.
The rooms of Glover’s Bookery are easily filled with thousands of books, but he said “this doesn’t scratch the surface, we have warehouses, plural.”
“Sometimes in one week we’ll get three calls, and all of a sudden we’ve got three or four thousand books we didn’t have on Monday,” he said. “So, there are times when you come in here and there are stacks because I’m working on them, getting them evaluated.”
Glover has to single-handedly clean the books, price them, input them into the computer and get them sorted and put away. He said once a section is full, there will be stacks of books in front of it.
Everything in his store, whether it looks that way or not, is organized. He said there are times where the aisle ways are very narrow and hard to walk through, but things never stay static.
He said there really have not been many challenges along the way, but the internet is something that has made things more difficult.
“The internet has made it harder to get customers into the store, because people go to Amazon, so I, more or less, provide them with an environment to go to enjoy old books,” Glover said. “You sure can’t get the joy of going through a used, rare bookstore by sitting in front of a computer.”
In the late ‘80s, Glover said his stepson was attending UK, majoring in electrical engineering, with a network computing focus. He said his stepson came home one day and told him “there’s this thing called the internet that’s going commercial, and books are perfect for it.”
The two of them gathered parts and built their first computer together since it was too expensive to buy a computer during that time, Glover said. They went online with gloversbookery.com in 1994.
Glover said he makes many sales through this website, as well as AbeBooks and Amazon shops, both of which contacted him about putting his database on their website.
Being so close to UK, Glover said he also gets to see several new, young faces because of the amount of student apartments in the area now.
He also attends several different book fairs throughout the year where he can showcase some of his books.
“I personally enjoy having and being able to read different things,” Glover said. “Archaeology is my passion of course, but pioneer history, I love early pioneer history, and this is a great place in the country to be for that. Because, I mean, this was the heart of getting over the Appalachians.”
He said he likes first-hand accounts, not only in the Pioneer Period, but in the Revolutionary War and Civil War.
“Whether it’s traveling through this area in the late 1700s or whether it’s trying to survive the Civil War, I want to know what the person that was actually there was experiencing and thinking. I think that might come a little bit from my military background,” Glover said.
He said everyone always asks him how many of the books in his store he has actually read, and he said he’s read a few.
“In this business, you read a book by reading the dust jacket flap, because that gives you a quick synopsis of the book,” he said. “If it’s non-fiction, you kind of read the forward and the introduction, scan through it. This is dealing with books that you haven’t had before, and if you’re really ever curious about the book, you go to the conclusion. You just skip everything I’ve been telling you.”
He said you do not have time as a collector to sit down and read all of these books. He will have a stack of 30 books at a time that all need to be researched and priced, which does not leave much time for reading.
As a book dealer, he said a lot of the reading is a spot here and there, “but then they’ll (book collectors) hit one that is really, really neat and tuck it under your arm and take it home for a month and add it to the stacks that are already there and eventually get it read.”
Glover said his favorite book of all time is “Gone with the Wind.” He said he likes the characters and the conflict within the story, and with being southern it brings back a feeling of home.
When asked about the future of his business he said he had really never given it much thought.
What he started out thinking would just be a weekend gig and a neat thing to do, turned into possibly forever.
“They’ll probably carry me out in a body bag,” Glover said with a chuckle.
