A few words about Groats Good Books and its namesake.

Ten years ago, after retiring at age sixty-five from the Corps of Engineers, Brookline native Silas Augustine Justin Groat purchased—or “saved,” as many would later say—the property on which now stands the depository that bears his name, sans apostrophe. The building was once St. Andrew’s Methodist Church, and it was considered by experts in such matters to be an architectural anomaly from the late nineteenth-century, in that it did not conform to the high-arched, deep-gabled, neo-Gothic style that was ubiquitous for New England churches at the time. Its designer espoused functionality and severity rather than fashion. The building had walls of limestone, a roof, a slate floor, a chancel, an altar-platform, a steeple, and little else.

The owner of the property in 1892, the year St. Andrew’s was constructed, was a man named Winston Millbanks. Not much is known about him except that he dropped out of Harvard after his first term and inherited a modest fortune from his great uncle, a British banking scion and philanthropist, upon that man’s death in 1889. An article in one of the local newspapers announced the consecration of St. Andrew’s, although it did not say who Millbanks commissioned to design the church—one might infer that he designed it himself—nor did it speculate on why he’d chosen to build with limestone and not timber, which was far less expensive, easier to come by, and more manageable.

Though a Brookline mainstay for over a century, St. Andrew’s the institution proved to be less enduring than its stony residence. Services were suspended in March of 2001 after attendance and donations hit unsustainable lows. For reasons that remain undocumented and undisclosed, the church was never granted landmark status by the city of Brookline and was two days away from the bulldozer when it caught the attention of Silas Groat.

One might assume that Silas purchased St. Andrew’s because of his religious convictions. But this was not the case. Silas was neither a Methodist nor a Christian. He wasn’t anything classifiable, really. While he was not a believer in a deity, he would have eschewed the Atheist brand. Agnostic was out, too, because he did not believe that faith in an Almighty was altogether impossible. (Impractical, perhaps. Irrational, surely.) From his studies in science and mathematics, and from years of reading literature, history, and philosophy, Silas had come to understand that an infinitude of phenomena exist that will forever lie beyond our earthbound abilities to intuit, let alone comprehend, and within this understanding, he recognized his own exemplary insignificance. “I am dust, I am air, I am electrons and nuclei and empty space, as ephemeral as a bubble. And yet I can savor the taste of strawberries and feel joy in the presence of my children.” This was his consolation, vaguely conceived but based on sound principles. It freed him from having to worry about gloomy things such as Final Judgment and the condition of his soul at the moment of death. And thus the reasons behind Silas’s church-purchase could not be attributed to anything resembling a deep faith in Christ. In fact, for the remainder of his days he never revealed why he felt the need to disembarrass himself of a far-from-negligible pension to save the old stone eyesore from destruction, except to say that the chapel and the three acres it occupied “had to be preserved, upon my life.”

Silas grew up three blocks from St. Andrew’s. It is unknown whether he ever set foot in the building before he became its owner; however, it is probable that St. Andrew’s did hold special significance for him.

A Sunday afternoon in June, 1949. One of those spring-killing scorchers with tangs of pine sap and honeysuckle in the air. Twelve-year-old Silas Groat and his friend Marcie Troutman, age fourteen, sit on the shaded concrete steps of St. Andrew’s Methodist Church, enjoying two double-scoop ice cream cones. Marcie’s scrupulously applied licks had reshaped her vanilla orbs into an alabaster column. Silas’s, by contrast, was a melted mess that sheathed his hand in strawberry-pink like a lady’s glove. Marcie, succumbing to overconfidence, lets her vanilla pillar become too fragile at the base. Her tongue tries to compensate, but when she fails to retract her upper incisors in time, the structure topples. The two watch in silence as the ice cream forms a puddle on the ground and expands in the heat. And this is when Silas, delirious from too much sugar, leans over and offers Marcie the pathetic dregs of his strawberry goo, dribbling much of it onto her dress, which happens to be the same shade of pink, so neither of them notice. She responds to his kind gesture with one of her own: a kiss (on the mouth!).

At first, Silas’s plan was to restore St. Andrew’s and rededicate it to the city. But once the restoration was underway, the idea of giving the church back to a community that would have stood by as its stone walls were pulverized began to taste sour. The best way to protect the landmark, he thought, was to use it to start a business that would benefit the public good. The full proposal was hatched whole, then and there. “I’ll get some books, build some shelves, and open a library. The world is overrun with churches, but it can never have enough libraries.”

Silas endowed his plucky enterprise with his personal collection, books and periodicals that numbered into the thousands. He borrowed a neighbor’s pickup and transported hardcovers, paperbacks, scientific journals, and issues of Time, Life, Newsweek, Scientific American, and National Geographic—many of which stretched back to the fifties and sixties and were in mint condition—from his overflowing den to their new home. He also bought a handsaw (electric tools frightened him), hammer, nails, and cedar planks to make the shelves. Out came the dust-covered pews and cobweb-draped altar and in went the seeds of Silas’s future.

Less than a year elapsed from the day Silas closed on the St. Andrew’s site to the day Groats Good Books opened to the public. Silas later quipped that getting Groats up and running was one of the least stressful ventures he had ever undertaken. Compared to erecting bridges that could support Army tanks or gun towers that could withstand direct mortar fire, building a library out of an old church was a cinch.

Though Silas was extraordinary in many ways, he had no idea how to run a library. He didn’t bother to learn about library science and knew nothing about upkeep or cataloguing. Nor did he trouble himself with readership trends. Bestsellers and popular fiction were stuffed into bottom shelves, while those titles, authors, editions, and imprints that were devilishly tricky to obtain were given prominence. Silas could often be seen sifting through crates of donations in a relentless search for the esoteric, the recondite, the weird. He was convinced that judicious readers (himself first and foremost) would appreciate the novelty of Groats. And for the most part he was right. Bibliophiles and rare-book hounds could not resist the esoteric library, where they could spelunk for hours, keeping their gloom-adjusted, dust-resistant eyes peeled for precious finds, whether a signed first edition of Robert Pinsky’s Landor’s Poetry, a one-volume 1921 edition of Thomas Hardy’s The Dynasts, or a Kessinger Rare Reprint of Folktales of Kashmir by J. Hinton Knowles. All of which rested on Groats’ shelves, awaiting happy borrowers.

Silas’s daughter Teresa took over her father’s legacy in August of 2004 after Silas and Mrs. Groat retired to their nephew’s cattle ranch in North Dakota. Relative to her father’s conceptions of book lending, Teresa was a radical. She purchased database software and labels to tape to the spines so that Groats patrons would not be thoroughly confounded.

Though he had never laid eyes on the man, Richard could conjure the face of Silas Groat without hesitation. A black-and-white photograph that hung in the foyer, taken days before the founder’s departure, revealed a cherubic visage, a lipless mouth, a nose like a padlock, snowdrifts of hair skimming a lake of baldness, and halting, diffident eyes that sought shelter under an outthrust brow. It was a face fortified by pride, seemingly ignorant of its strangeness, muted by an expression of solemnity worthy of a full moon on a cloudless night.

So how did Richard find this place?

He didn’t. Ivan did. Whenever Ivan visited his son in Brookline, he often took long walks, his only exercise, while Richard was at work. One day, quite by accident, he glimpsed the sign of the book and his curiosity drew him inside. “Richard!” he roared as his son shambled into the kitchen after a long day of sparring with Otto, “have you heard of this place? It’s like something out of Borges. Don’t take off your coat. We’re going.”

Richard’s sessions at Groats used to be weekly, and then they’d diminished to twice a month. These days he stopped in every three or four months, though he always made sure to renew his membership. Sometimes he would run his eyes up and down the stacks and pluck a ripened fruit and retreat to a corner to devour chapters whole. But his usual pattern was to circulate and get lost in the thicket of spines, savoring the fusty allure of old pages. He rarely checked out a book.

He’d always found something worthwhile whenever he’d wandered into Groats. He couldn’t explain it, but he could go to a random shelf, close his eyes, reach out, and come back with a limited edition prize, an out-of-print gem, or an old favorite that Ivan had cherished. Was there some sort of magic at work? When he entered, did every shelf suddenly become heavy with books only he’d love, changing again for the next patron? He would not have been surprised had he learned that Silas had possessed such power, for how else could such a place coexist with monsters like Amazon and Barnes & Noble consuming everything in their path?

Next Chapter: Part Three: Diversions, Digressions, Discoveries, Chapter X