Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, May 10, 1993 TAG: 9305100012
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By STRAT DOUTHAT ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: UNION, CONN. LENGTH: Long
Though he only finished the seventh grade, Marty Doyle may be doing as much as anyone in New England to encourage people to sit down with a good book.
For the past decade, the 70-year-old Doyle has been giving away books at the Traveler Restaurant, a place where patrons are urged to make a choice from an estimated 2,000 titles lining the walls.
There's no catch - and no charge. You don't even have to buy a sandwich or a cup of coffee to take a book.
"We'll give you a book if you just come in to use the restroom," says Doyle, a friendly, gray-haired man with an aging athlete's body and the flattened nose of a former boxer.
Doyle has worked at a variety of jobs over the past 50 years - including truck driver, plant salesman, short-order cook, motel manager and logger - but has always been an avid reader and book collector. He says he spends more than $10,000 a year seeking out and buying truckloads of used books.
"I've been doing this for 10 years," he says. "Actually, it's something that sort of got out of hand. I had about 30,000 books piled up around my house and my wife finally got fed up one day and said something had to go - it was either me or the books."
So, he hauled a few cartons of books over to the restaurant and invited his customers to help themselves. They did, and a tradition was born.
"Initially, I just planned to give away a few of my extra books," he says. "But last year I gave away 100,000 books. That comes to about 50 tons of books."
In January, Doyle sold the restaurant to two of his employees, but as part of the deal he'll continue to supply the restaurant with free books.
"I promised to keep the shelves stocked, whether it takes 100,000 or 125,000," he says.
Doyle gets his books from a variety of sources, including libraries, estate sales, bookstore auctions, flea markets and anonymous donors.
"It's not unusual to find a carton of books by the front door," he says. "I just bought 15,000 books from a man in Fall River, Mass., and when a Cambridge woman, a former customer, died recently, she left us about 1,500 books from her library."
Doyle keeps about 30,000 books in a barn and outbuilding behind the rustic, yellow-roofed restaurant, which sits beside Interstate 84 at Exit 74, midway between Boston and Hartford. Whenever the restaurant's supply gets low, Doyle brings in a few boxes from the barn.
Many of the Traveler Restaurant's customers are regulars who say they stop by as much for the books as for the food.
"I come in every couple of weeks to browse," says Bill Peters, a retired librarian at the University of Connecticut. "This is a great place to find obscure books from the '30s and '40s. Marty has given me a lot of books over the years."
Doyle doesn't catalog the books on the restaurant's shelves. A copy of the Reader's Digest Condensed Books may be found next to "Waiting For Godot," or "Vanity Fair."
However, customers who want to browse among cataloged books can visit the bookstore beneath the restaurant.
"I opened the bookstore a couple of years ago. It was a sort of unexpected spinoff, but we now have 35,000 books down there," says Doyle, who will continue to run the bookstore and plans to open a gift shop next door to the restaurant.
Bob Weeks, a traveling salesman from Sharon, Mass., says he seldom goes downstairs to the bookstore because he likes to be surprised when he wanders among the restaurant bookshelves.
"I usually try and pick out a book for my wife. She's the reader in the family," Weeks said as he attacked a hot turkey sandwich and scanned a copy of "The People's Pharmacy," a consumer's guide to prescription drugs.
He says he discovered the restaurant four years ago.
"I stopped in by happenstance," he says. "I was hungry."
He has been coming back ever since.
"I represent several food service equipment companies, so I know a good restaurant when I see one," Weeks says. "In this place you can find a good book and get a good meal. I've never seen any place like it."
Doyle says he never dreamed he would become a bookstore owner and literary philanthropist when he was a kid growing up on a farm near North Adams, Mass., during the Great Depression. He quit school after the seventh grade, not because he didn't like going to class, but because he had to go to work and help feed the family.
"But I always read," he says. "I read pulp magazines. Doc Savage, The Shadow, things like that. Later, I moved on to Max Brand and Zane Grey. I used to hide out behind the barn with a book when I was supposed to be tending the cows. I caught more hell for reading than for anything else I've ever done."
Doyle doesn't read as much as he used to, now that he's up to his ears in books.
"I scan a lot of books now, but when you're handling 100,000 books a year you don't have much time to read them," he says.
But he's not complaining.
"I love fooling with books," he says. "And people are so friendly, when they realize you're giving them a book and there's no gimmick attached. Everybody says nobody reads anymore, but I've found that there are still plenty of book people out there."
by CNB