We talk with plenty of authors on our show, plus a few librarians, some bookstore owners and readers. We love books. So let me ask you — what do you do with your books when you've finished them? Do you save your favorites for a special place on a shelf? Do you loan them out? Or if they're from the library, do you return them on time?
For some, holding on to a book is more than just an opportunity to read it again. Book collectors might love the thrill of the hunt, or the knowledge that their most cherished author is well represented in their home, or it's a chance to showcase a rare find. Or for some, it's an investment.
This week, Greg Giezentanner, owner of Once Upon a Time Books, and Adam Fall, sales and merchandising manager and researcher for Once Upon a Time Books, came to the Anthony and Susan Hui News Studio. They both love books, and they love the stories connected to them. Across their three locations there are pre-read volumes of every kind.
Greg says his professional life didn't begin with books, but in horticulture.
Greg Giezentanner: My wife came home one day and said they're opening up an antique mall down the street. We've got a bunch of stuff in the closet. We drug the kids out to garage sales and flea markets all growing up. And so yeah, we'll do that. But I don't have a lot of time. My degree is in horticulture, and I was a landscape contractor. But I said, if I have time, I'll help. So we got two booths. And one day I decided I'd put some books in one, and this is '97. And they sold. And I said, well, that's interesting. And I kept doing it and showed up to an estate sale and bought a pickup truck full of books, kicked her out of her garage. And I told a friend of mine, I said, my wife's mad at me because I kicked her out. I have all these books. It's going to take me forever to sell them. He said, you ought to sell those on eBay. And I said, hmm, people buy books on eBay? This is in '98.
Adam Fall: I think that was when people still said "the electronic bay."
Giezentanner: And my wife was very eager to get those books out. So she did the research and figured out how to list, and we did it just for funsies for a while. And then I found a book that sold for almost $4,000. And I said, I think I want to try this full time. And she said, okay, maybe. So we've been doing it full time for 27 years.
Kyle Kellams: Adam, how did you become involved?
Fall: I moved here from St. Louis in February of 2020, which, as you know, is in the before times.
Kellams: Barely.
Fall: I was here for about three weeks before the COVID lockdown. Coming to work for them was when the Bentonville store opened in October of 2020, right when I was trying to find other work and something with longevity after moving from home. I started working at the Bentonville store part time, quickly quit my other job to go full time. And then within the first four to six months, after meeting Greg and getting plugged in — because I had worked in books before — he was like, hey, we've got this really cool collection of early "Wizard of Oz" books. And the thing about "Wizard of Oz" books is they're very collectible, but they're also maybe the most painful to price and figure out what year and what edition they are. Pre-1935, they would have the color plates in them. Post-1935, they wouldn't. But people love those color plates so they would harvest them and take them out. So you had to make sure they hadn't been. The boards would be different colors. Because back then they didn't put subsequent printings on copyright pages, so you had just the one date. And when you go online to research it, everybody else who thinks they have a first edition doesn't, because they only know, oh, the copyright says 1916, I guess it's a first. So he had me try my hand at those, and then some early Harry Potters, because we don't get the first two or three in real first editions. He had me try my hand at that, and that was probably four to five months into working for him. And I loved it, and it worked out well. And now over the course of coming up on six years, I get to touch everything cool that comes through, for all three retail stores.
Kellams: My oftentime collaborator Becca Martin Brown was telling me about a book you have that she thought was amazing.
Giezentanner: Volume 4 of "The North American Indian" by Edward Curtis. It is an iconic piece. The set is 20 volumes in full, and each volume comes with a portfolio. We don't have the portfolio for Volume 4, and it's the Absaroka and Hidatsa volume. And unbeknownst to us, Becca is part of the group up at the Museum of Native American History in Bentonville. Adam had contacted them about that volume, plus some other things he put together, and we took them up there and just had a really nice morning showing them what we had.
Fall: We had about 24 books in total for them to look at, and we capped it off with the Edward Curtis piece. Crystal Bridges has a full set right now that you can go see. And that was kind of when I saw it there — I was like, man, we really need to reach out to the Museum of Native American History and show them. We got to see it on Mother's Day. And for the only time I've ever seen them all at once, the whole set. And interestingly, the set without the portfolios is still a million dollars. With the portfolios, it's three million. So if you were to look up the highest-value books that regularly sell, you've got the Audubon book, the Gutenberg Bible — which does trade hands occasionally — the Shakespeare folio. And in the top five is this set. I would say, aside from the Audubon, it's the most valuable book ever published in the United States.
Kellams: There's also a story connected to a first edition of "In Cold Blood."
Fall: So this is one of those cases where when you ask the right questions, cool things happen. I was in the Bentonville store at the end of April, and this guy came in and said, hey, I've got this book I'm curious about the value on. We don't really do formal appraisals, because it can get messy. I don't want to give somebody information like "this is what we could sell it for" — that's not necessarily what they could sell it for in a retail space.
Giezentanner: There's a conflict of interest there.
Fall: Not to mention, pricing something for online is very different than retail. But I always ask, well, what do you have? And this gentleman said, I have a signed first edition of "In Cold Blood" by Truman Capote. And I was immediately floored. "In Cold Blood" is the first work of modern true crime
Kellams: New journalism.
Fall: The reason we have this entire podcast movement of people listening to the most horrible murders while they go to sleep. Very important, especially as a Midwest book.
And so I said, are you looking to sell it? And he was like, well, it comes with a little bit of a story. His name is Steve. Steve worked with an auctioneer when he was 16 years old in Kansas. The year before, he had done a book report on "In Cold Blood," because he grew up on a farm just 30 miles from the home where the murders took place. So he was working for this auctioneer and found a box, and at the bottom of it was a hardcover of "In Cold Blood." He put the box aside so he could kind of get first dibs on bidding. It was just a box of books — nobody was really clamoring for it. He got the box for $10. Years go by. A friend comes to him and says, hey, I don't know if you know how big a deal it is that you have a signed first edition of this. And so he started figuring out what to do with it. He's had it 34 years.
He told me all of that, and I said, I sure would like to see it. So he left the store, went back home, grabbed it, came back that same day. And it still has the newspaper clippings in it at the front — about a signing or reading Capote was doing at a drugstore. Steve said it was only the second reading Capote had done after publication. It has the whole photo of Truman Capote, the whole article.
Kellams: So the local newspaper account of the event.
Fall: We can't say definitively, but that's likely where it was signed. The closest thing you can get to provenance with something like that.
We were looking this over, and he goes, well, I didn't tell you the coolest part yet. And I was like, okay — we've already gotten a cool enough bit of this story that it's cooler than 10 out of 10 things people sometimes bring in.
He said the night the murders happened, his family didn't know it was that night — they pieced it together later. His dad shot up in bed hearing somebody tear down the county road outside their farm. Which is very strange, because living out in the middle of nowhere in Kansas, that doesn't happen. And then, some time later, his dad was going from one side of their farm to the other, and he came upon a bunch of police officers and FBI agents. He asked what they were doing, and they said, we're looking for something that pertains to an open investigation.
Steve is very much into his research. He found the original Scott City newspaper clipping saying what they were looking for and that it was found. He has the land and ownership records. He emailed the sheriff's department, and they couldn't send the original police report, but they wrote up what was in it. Some of the murder paraphernalia from the book was found in a ditch along his family's property — shotgun shells, bloody clothes. And in the book, at the end, one of the killers gives the whole layout: we were driving to town, it was all lit up, which it wasn't lit up — it was an oil refinery. And so they took the county road outside his parents' property. And Steve, growing up hearing that story, was interested in the book. Did the book report. Then, because he did that and was working for the auctioneer, found this book. And he's had it for 34 years.
It is for sale at the Bentonville location for $5,000.
Kellams: That's less than I thought you were going to say.
Fall: Hey, you heard it here, folks on KUAF. That is a deal. I know it's fair. We just, a couple of weeks ago, had a guy come in who bought a first edition set of the "Chronicles of Narnia" by C.S. Lewis and a very rare set — never available to the public, essentially a book club set of early "Lord of the Rings" from the UK. He dropped about $13,000. So it's not out of the realm of possibility.
Kellams: It's of course interesting geographically — the incident in "In Cold Blood" didn't happen too far away from here. I wonder if, in Arkansas, a Charles Portis or a Donald Harington or a Vance Randolph will go for more than it would in a bookstore in Oregon or Puerto Rico or someplace.
Giezentanner: Interestingly, I do business with a dealer in Colorado, and I found a Randolph set while I was there a couple of months ago, and he had just about as much on it as you would see here. The age of the internet has really changed a lot of things.
Fall: But it does sell faster here. A lot more people coming through. And the people here — when you have somebody like Greg to educate me, because I haven't been doing this as long as he has. How many books have you touched?
Giezentanner: Simple math — I'm in the 35 to 40 million range, pretty easily.
Fall: He's done Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours about eight times over.
Giezentanner: I worked 20-something years, 80 to 85 hours a week.
Kellams: What makes a collector a collector, you think?
Fall: That's a question for me. I think of everything as a customer first because I've got a problem. My favorite author is Stephen Graham Jones, who the library just had in back in April. I think I'm up to 109 signatures, between advanced reader copies, paperback editions, first editions, signed limited editions, his comics, out-of-print versions, reprinted versions. I'm 34 — I grew up in the age of Pokémon, and it is that collectible mentality of, well, if I'm going to be into this, I'm going to try and collect all of it. And so when I go into merchandising or pricing, a lot of it is figuring out why somebody collects a specific thing. It really comes down to, collectors like something so much that they want to preserve the history. They love that author so much. It's a shelf trophy. And it's an investment, because while the book industry has had its ups and downs, collectible books have held their value really well.
Adam Fall is sales and merchandising manager and researcher for Once Upon a Time Books. Greg Giezentanner is owner of the three locations in Tontitown, Bentonville and Fayetteville. They came to the Anthony and Susan Hui News Studio earlier this week.
A chance to hear from author Rick Atkinson is approaching. "The Fate of the Day" is this year's selection for If All Arkansas Read the Same Book, and he'll discuss it next week at the Bentonville Public Library. I'll sit down with him at the library Thursday, May 28, beginning at noon. It's in partnership with the Arkansas Center for the Book at the Arkansas State Library and Two Friends Books in Bentonville.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
