At Avenue Victor Hugo, remembrances of good books past

For the first nine years of his life, Vincent McCaffrey rarely opened a book. Then one day he strolled into a bookshop in his hometown of Larchmont, N.Y., and bought a paperback about pirates.

He took ''Treasure Island" back to his bedroom, the one with the slanted ceilings on the third floor of his old Victorian house, and read it cover to cover. The skinny, gawky boy who was lousy at sports had discovered the joy of escaping into a book.

Years later, when it came time for him to decide how to make a living, he raised a few thousand dollars and opened a second-hand bookshop on Newbury Street called Avenue Victor Hugo.

Now that chapter of his life is ending. On June 1, after nearly three decades in business, the shop will close.

It's a sad time for the bookseller, whose shop has given him much pleasure over the years and provided him with a refuge where he can ply his trade in peace.

''The world I love is gone," he says. ''It's a past age. It's over. It's done with."

The world that McCaffrey knew -- and loved -- went something like this: A man walks in and says he's looking for a good book. McCaffrey brings out a 1960 copy of Nevil Shute's ''Trustee from the Toolroom," a story about a model maker who sails to the South Seas to recover an inheritance. He tells the customer he's read it four times and was never disappointed.

''It's a human drama about a man doing the best in difficult circumstances," McCaffrey says, ''instead of giving up and not trying."

McCaffrey offers many reasons for the failure of his shop and other small, used-book stores: People would rather watch television than read; they would rather go to a well-organized Barnes & Noble at the mall than a cluttered bookstore off the beaten path; and they would rather buy used books on the Internet, where the prices are often cheaper. (McCaffrey says his prices are higher because he has to calculate in overhead costs, such as rent and worker salaries; the mom-and-pop operators sell from home and have few business-related expenses, he says.)

For the students and writers who have been patronizing the shop for years, the closing is a loss for the book-loving community.

''I think it's an enormous tragedy," says Floyd Kemske, a novelist who lives in Pepperell. ''I think it's a sad commentary on human nature that we can't support a bookshop like that. It shows me that maybe reading is a dying art, that people aren't taking very much joy in the physicality of books. I guess people are used to Amazon.com, where you click on a link. That's useful if you need a special book, but it's never going to open a new area for you."

Avenue Victor Hugo has the lived-in look of a college professor's office. Books are crammed onto shelves and piled in corners. Old prints of Paris scenes -- booksellers along the Seine, a waif on a city street -- hang on the walls. Blue Bart, a Russian blue cat with a silvery sheen, prowls the stacks keeping glue-nibbling mice at bay.

Sarah Manning, 28, of Malden, first visited the shop a decade ago when she was a college student. She likes its coziness, the way you can sit on a dusty stepstool in a maze of bookcases and flip through an old copy of ''Laughing Boy" without being bothered.

''I like the feeling," she says. ''Everything is crowded together, and I'm surrounded by books."

McCaffrey is 56 years old, a burly man with thick salt-and-pepper hair and a coarse, unruly mustache. He wears big, unfashionable wire-framed glasses, and his clothes are loose-fitting faded jeans and a wrinkled button-down with the sleeves rolled up. He wears his Teva sandals with socks and doesn't own a watch. He's been known to take his phone off the hook in his Brookline apartment if he doesn't want to be disturbed.

He grew up in New York with parents who never read to him. His early years in school were frustrating. He was a poor student and a bad reader -- that is, until he ventured into the Larchmont shop and bought the Robert Louis Stevenson paperback with money he had made mowing lawns.

''It was just an absolutely fabulous and wonderful adventure story," he says, ''and it involved a kid."

Books took over his life. He read Darwin's ''The Voyage of the Beagle," and Twain's ''Life on the Mississippi." In high school, he read Steinbeck, Hemingway, and Wolfe. After college, he moved to Boston, and in 1975, he opened the shop, naming it after the great French writer who immortalized a hunchback. (He remained at that spot, at 339 Newbury St., for 28 years, before moving up the street to his current place 16 months ago.)

A big part of McCaffrey's job has been going to auctions looking for books. At an auction in Northampton six years ago, he came across an 18th-century copy of Cicero's writings, a gem bound in vellum and small enough to fit in his shirt pocket. He opened it and noticed that some passages had been underlined with an old fountain pen. The ink had faded to brown. Then he turned his attention to the inside cover.

''I'm looking at the words and I pick out the word president," he says. ''Then I pick out the word Jefferson. I went out of my skin.

He had to make some quick choices. The book was among a pile of 100 or so books on a table. Does he reveal his find, ask that the book be auctioned separately and risk being outbid? Or does he keep his mouth shut and purchase the entire pile? He kept silent and bought everything for $300.

''I will never sell it," he says. ''It's priceless."

Those dramatic moments in the business are rare, McCaffrey says, and that's fine with him. The job is not about tracking down the great book, he says; it's about finding the good book, the Nevil Shute.

McCaffrey's shop did well until 1999, about the time Internet book sales took off. That change, coupled with huge rent increases on the ever-increasingly chic Newbury Street, forced him to close in late 2002. A few months later, he reopened in less expensive space at 353 Newbury St., but he couldn't rebound financially.

Looking back, he says he has no regrets. He did exactly what he wanted to do and made enough money to raise three children. He pities the man who spends his life at a job he hates, daydreaming about his next vacation.

He says it is with a ''bit of irony" that he starts his new career: selling books on the Internet. He may also write fiction.

Over the next two weeks, he'll continue selling books at half-price. He may even sell some of the pine bookcases his brother, Joe, built when the shop opened. They've been scratched by Blue Bart, but they're sturdy, and their dovetails are still tight.

''It's going to be hellish to decide which shelves to keep and which shelves to let go, McCaffrey says. ''You get attached to the shelves."