A master of oddball characters

Gregory Gibson, author of "Hubert's Freaks," brings to life a piece of Times Square history. (Lisa Poole for the boston globe)

GLOUCESTER - Gregory Gibson knows a thing or two about sideshows. The author and book dealer's grand-uncle was Houdini's ghostwriter. His father, a traveling salesman, often gathered magicians in his living room.

But the son was disdainful. His father's illusionist friends were "way too flim-flam-y for me," Gibson recalls. "I took an attitude like a son often will."

At 63, however, he finds himself engrossed in an extraordinary saga of carnivalesque proportions. The themes of Gibson's latest work, "Hubert's Freaks," feed plenty of the writer's many appetites. There's the musty allure of old bookshops and the antiquarian circuit, the personal turmoil and idiosyncrasies of Bob, his main character, and the David-and-Goliath tale of one lone nebbish doing battle in the imposing galleries of the high-stakes art world.

At the heart of it, there's the exotic weirdness of the core subject: a seedy, long-defunct Times Square attraction known as Hubert's Museum, where men with gruesome birth defects and dark-skinned women who danced with snakes toiled in obscurity.

The book, subtitled "The Rare-Book Dealer, the Times Square Talker, and the Lost Photos of Diane Arbus," tells the true and sordid tale of Gibson's friend Bob Langmuir, a fellow buyer and seller of American ephemera whom the writer has known for more than two decades. Langmuir, an odd duck from Philadelphia, made the find of a lifetime when he bought a trunk full of artifacts documenting an old New York freak show: a trove of previously unseen prints by the late, celebrated photographer Arbus.

Improbably, this peculiar story turns out to be a page-turner of the first order. As Langmuir suffers through a protracted divorce, he whiplashes between elation over the astronomical resale prospects for his Arbus photos and the sobering realization that he is completely out of his element in the halls of world-class auction houses and art institutions.

And he finds an uncanny connection with the deceased "Times Square Talker," a struggling African-American man who gathered the collection while working as the doorman at Hubert's.

Gibson's recent book launch at the Strand Book Store in Greenwich Village was, the author says, itself nearly as much of a circus as Hubert's was in its heyday. The self-proclaimed Nigerian prince who sold Langmuir the trunk was there, barking about a lawsuit. A hirsute man who looked to Gibson like Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy laid his own loud claim to the archive. A third man demanded that proceeds from the forthcoming auction be directed to one Presto the Magician, a Hubert's fixture who was still, just barely, alive.

He couldn't have paid three performance artists to disrupt the event more entertainingly, says Gibson. Sitting on the sunny front porch of his Gloucester home, the author recalls his friend Langmuir panicking over the whole episode.

"Bob was in agony, curled up in the fetal position in the children's section," Gibson says. To make matters worse, the auction house, Phillips de Pury, canceled its sale.

When he finished writing the book, Gibson says, he was surprised to feel that the story might actually come to a happy ending. The obsessively worrisome Langmuir had gotten his personal house in order, and he was preparing to make the deal of his life.

Now, says the author, it's clear this cockamamie series of events has no resolution in sight. "It's an absolute mess," he says, not without amusement.

Born in Athol, Gibson attended high school on Long Island. After his parents' divorce he followed a friend on a fishing trip to Cape Ann, instantly deciding he'd spend the rest of his life here. Following a stint in the Navy, he met his wife and began peddling rare books.

Though he burned through a succession of his own bookshops, he was always more comfortable on the road, on the hunt.

"I think Greg would rather be buried in an anthill than sit in a shop," says his friend Bob Ritchie, owner of Gloucester's Dogtown Book Shop.

But the market for printed collectibles isn't what it used to be, Gibson grumbles.

As a result, he recently unloaded most of the contents of his tiny bookstore across the winding road from his house.

He started writing his own books out of terrible necessity, when his oldest son, Galen, was killed in a rampage shooting at his small Western Massachusetts college. "Gone Boy: A Walkabout" is Gibson's acclaimed account of his own enraged pursuit of the facts.

Langmuir, he says, entrusted him to write his own delicate life story because of Gibson's brutal honesty in writing "Gone Boy."

"He knew I'd been to the mountain," Gibson says.

Langmuir, reached at his home near Philadelphia, agrees that the two worked well together. "It was another form of therapy, if you will," he says. "Greg, I felt, was a guy I could trust."

Though the story inevitably became Gibson's - "obviously there's gonna be some warpage," he says - Langmuir instinctively recognized that his personal transformation after his crushing divorce was at least as crucial to the telling as his collection of stuff.

"He said, 'This story is really a spiritual journey,' " Gibson recalls. "The S.O.B., he was right."