Louis Strymish was a Harvard-trained chemist at a Massachusetts leather manufacturer when in 1957 he decided to chuck away his career to buy what friends and family assured him was the world's worst business.  A woman who reviewed books for Boston newspapers had made a small side living out of driving the boxloads of free review copies she received from publishers to local fairs and libraries to sell them at a steep discount from the cover price.  Tired of hauling books, she sold a garageful of them and her list of contacts to Strymish for $1,000, of which he borrowed $500 from a friend.  "I was buying good will and inventory," Strymish liked to tell people later.  "At least I got some inventory."  The business would be, he declared, the first step towards opening a bookstore.
     Running a bookstore had been a longstanding dream for Strymish, who as a child had been so introverted and so bedeviled by dyslexia, a then-unrecognized disability, that some teachers suspected he was retarded.  Largely by sheer force of will he learned to deal with the jumble of letters that faced him on every page, eventually fashioning himself into a prolific and enthusiastic reader who would carry on a life-long love affair with the printed word.  While earning his degree in chemistry from Harvard, he raised much of his tuition hawking newspapers from the slush near Boston's South Station, wrestling with the New York Times crossword puzzle during quiet moments.  But post-college life as a technician in New England's decaying leather industry proved neither emotionally nor financially rewarding.  He found himself gravitating towards publishing, and was selling magazine subscriptions when he came across the opportunity to plunge into the bookselling business.  Or at least into an odd corner of it, one that left him peddling reviewed, damaged, excess-stock and other cheap books to fair-goers and librarians as the proprietor and staff of The New England Mobile Book Fair.  A year later, with another loan from his friend, he was able to open a small bookstore in the West Roxbury section of Boston, which retained the festive name.
     Strymish didn't set his bookstore up to be like other bookstores.  To take advantage of his existing inventory, he ran it as a small wholesale warehouse specializing in bargain books, intended to appeal to librarians and other bookstore owners.  Unlike typical bookstore customers, such wholesale buyers generally are not looking for a few particular books, or books on a particular subject, and they don't need a cozy atmosphere to facilitate the casual browsing and test-driving of books.  So to save time and money, Strymish simply pulled books out of the boxes in which publishers had packed them and plunked them down onto rows of flimsy wooden shelving, leaving them clumped by publisher without otherwise bothering to sort them.  If a librarian or bookstore owner needed a specific title, author or subject, he or she didn't have to be told how to identify the books' publishers via the Books in Print catalog, which Strymish kept on hand to supplement his own considerable knowledge of the inventory.  The savings from not putting the books in order helped fuel deeper discounts for customers.
     Supported by no retail advertising, and displaying only a tiny, uninviting sign out front, Strymish's bookstore wasn't easily mistaken for a conventional one.  Still, curious civilians occasionally wandered in off the street, only to be promptly baffled.  It wasn't just the chintzy, cramped decor, complete with half-unpacked boxes and piles of unshelved books, that made the place look like a mess.  To the typical book-browser, the shelves seemed at first to be an undecodable hodge-podge.  If one of these customers asked where to find the books on history or auto mechanics or classic literature, Strymish would blithely rattle off the names of a few publishers or point the confused shopper towards Books In Print.  In a sense, the store was the opposite of another recently opened Boston-area business called Harvey's Hardware.  Both stores seemed disordered compared to competitors, if in different ways, but where Harvey Katz was forcing customers at his hardware store to rely on human guides to the confusion, Strymish required his customers to master it on their own
     Many customers fled, of course, leaving Strymish shrugging behind them.  But a good number were enticed by the cheap prices to stay and browse.  And a funny thing happened: once people got the hang of shopping by publisher, they tended to like it.  Though the public is mostly oblivious to who publishes which books, when readers start paying attention they discover that certain publishers put out books more likely to appeal to certain tastes.  And when forced to browse through a single publisher's books, customers end up stumbling on interesting books they never would have sought out.  Word started to get out among booklovers in university-lousy Greater Boston that the small warehouse was a stimulating and rewarding, if slightly goofy, place to stumble through an eclectic and oddly arranged selection of discount books.
     Today the New England Mobile Book Fair--or "Strymish's," as it's known locally--stands within five miles of two Barnes & Noble and two Borders stores comprising some 120,000 square feet of direct competition.  The squat, featureless warehouse--originally a tennis-racket factory--is surrounded by retail clothing stores and restaurants serving the affluent western suburbs of Boston.  With little indication of what wares are housed inside, the independent bookstore still outsells each of the four superstores in the area.
     A first question might be why, if one were going to set oneself up in a nondescript warehouse, one would bother to do so in a relatively high-priced retail Mecca.  The answer is that Strymish didn't plunk his store in the middle of all this; when he opened it in 1965, a few years after his first store was gutted in a fire, the store was a lone outpost of relatively genteel business neighbored by welding shops and lumber yards.  The other stores built around him over the years, ultimately proving Strymish to be, on top of everything else, an unlikely visionary of suburban commercial development.  (The warehouse today is actually a larger, but no less utilitarian, version of the original.)
     Though still a favorite of librarians and other wholesale buyers, the New England Mobile Book Fair is mostly a retail operation now, and has been for decades.  But don't tell this to the shoppers who pick their way through the dense, dingy, 35,000-square-foot forest of cheap, cramped shelving creaking with some two million titles.  Many of the customers think they're crashing a wholesale outlet.  What retailer would make it this hard to find a book?  Of course, to come to the Book Fair to find a specific book is to miss part of the point.  What the store excels at is providing an opportunity to find what you aren't looking for.  But even so, a customer who is looking for a specific title, or a book by a specific author, probably will find it faster here than they would in a Borders.  Or so argues Jon Strymish, one of Louis' sons.  That's because categorizing books by subjects, as virtually all bookstores do, isn't as helpful as people perceive it to be.  "If you're looking for a book by Julia Child, you know it's going to be in cookbooks," he says.  "But often you'll have trouble guessing what category a book is in."  Take the book you're reading right now, for example.  Would you have been able to guess how bookstores would categorize it?  One Barnes & Noble store manager said she had no idea where it would be stocked, but suggested that was par for the course.  The publisher usually recommends a category, she explained, adding, "Sometimes we just take our best guess, and that's where it ends up."  A manager at a Waldenbooks store noted that how a book is categorized sometimes depends on which employee unpacks the box.
     But since shoppers for a particular book or author at conventional bookstores tend to think they can guess the subject, they usually give it a try first, hunting down the appropriate section and scanning the shelves there for the book, typically failing and trying a different subject or two before giving up and asking an employee.  At the Book Fair, the strange organization scheme usually inspires the hunter of a specific book or author to give up at the outset and head straight to the store's copies of Books In Print--or more likely to the computer terminals that have long since automated that catalog's function--to find the book's publisher.  (Within publisher sections, books are alphabetized by author.)  "It's like the Dewey Decimal system--it might be hard to guess what a book's number is, but it's easy to look it up and go right to it," says Jon.  One could rightly argue that an advantage of grouping books by subject is that it gives readers a chance to browse through the books whose topics they're especially interested in.  But that assumes people want only books that neatly fall into a standard subject, which is often not the case.
     Louis Strymish passed away in 1983, and now Jon, 43, owns the company with his brother David.  Jon's features are somehow both sensitive and primitive, and they are set over a hulking, slightly stooped frame--the bookstore clerk that time forgot.  As he lumbers and lurches down the crazed, narrow aisles at speed, unable to resist grabbing books that are out of place and reshelving them on the fly, he has no trouble clearing a path through the clots of browsers; one mother seems to sense him coming, as if spotting ripples in a cup of liquid, and reflexively scoops her child well out of the way.  As in his father's day, a certain amount of customer assistance is available, but the emphasis is on figuring it out on your own.  Jon stops to discreetly listen in on a confused first-time customer standing at a computer terminal who has flagged down a harried employee to help him find the work of a particular author.  "What was I doing wrong?" the customer asks, as the employee deftly pulls up the author's listings.  "It wasn't you, it's the computer," she replies, generously, and describes what she had done to find them.  Then she briskly leads the customer to the shelves where the publisher can be found--the publisher's names are hand-written on irregularly shaped rectangles of paper taped or stapled onto the shelves--and helps him locate the author.  Jon grunts, apparently in approval.  It has taken a few minutes, but now one more book shopper knows how to deal with the Book Fair system; he may never have to seek an employee's help here again.
     But even aside from the leap to computer cataloging, the Book Fair is not a frozen, supersized incarnation of Louis Strymish's original vision.  Actually, it has become a fairly complex business, though it's not the sort of complexity of which a management-consulting firm might approve.  Instead, it's now a crazy quilt of a company, a mix of the eclectic, eccentric styles of the people who run it.  It isn't a total mess; rather, some aspects of the business are messy in some dimensions, to some extent, and in ways that change over time.  You might say it's malleably semi-messy.
     One of the people who make it so is Steve Gans, the company's chief operating officer and general counsel, and the son of the man who twice loaned Louis money in the 1950s to get started.  Gans grew up playing with Jon and David, and did time as an attorney at a major Boston law firm before he finally recognized in 1993 that Book Fair resistance was futile.  A good-naturedly frantic man in jeans and sneakers, Gans operates out of the landing of a stairway that leads to the roof.  He tried to requisition an actual room for an office when he signed up, but was told by Jon that God intended actual rooms to serve as places to pile books, and any person who thought he or she could find room between the piles to wedge a desk was welcome to try.  Since Gans' legal work required a certain measure of privacy, he took over the only unburied, quiet eight square feet in the entire vast facility.  The only reason that stairway was free, he notes, is because using it for storage would have defied fire codes.  Even here, numerous boxes sponge up the little space not taken up by his desk.
     As seems to be the case for everyone who works at the company, Gans' job description includes doing pretty much whatever he wants, as long as there's some chance that it will contribute to the business, or at least not hurt it too much.  Gans started a cookbook publishing company under the Book Fair umbrella called Biscuit Books.  "We had no time for it, but we thought we'd have fun with it," he explains.  He was inspired by the cookbook sales business David Strymish had already co-founded called Jessica's Biscuit (named after two dogs), which was in turn followed by a coffee bean-sales business that occasioned the importing of an industrial roaster into the company.
     The Book Fair's competition is quite a bit steeper now than in Louis's days.  For starters there are the superstores, though Gans is relatively sanguine about them, noting that in 1995, the year the first Barnes & Noble and Borders opened up down the road, the Book Fair's sales rose 10 percent.  Though the privately held company doesn't release financial information, past comments by the Strymish brothers and Gans suggest that annual sales for the bookstore float roughly in the $10 million range, not including another few million dollars from Jessica's Biscuit.  In comparison, average single-store sales for Barnes & Noble and Borders are around half that much.
     Amazon.com is another matter.  "Amazon costs us millions," says Gans.  In particular, Amazon has proven a vicious competitor to Jessica's Biscuit, which focuses on discount online sales of cookbooks.  Gans describes how Amazon once dropped its prices on all twelve books featured in Jessica's catalog just a few hours after the catalog was e-mailed to customers.  Sales commenced a two-year plunge at Jessica's when Amazon started offering free shipping for orders of at least $25 at the end of 2002, until Jessica's found a way to match the offer.  Jessica's has beefed up its call center and fulfillment operation to chase some of Amazon's efficiencies, all while continuing to avoid looking anything like a tightly run organization.  Its inventory room, for instance, looks less like one of Amazon's celebratedly hyper-ordered, Segway-Scooterized warehouses than what one imagines the inside of one of those warehouse's dumpsters might look like.  Gans assesses it as if realizing what it must look like to an outsider and shrugs.  "Okay, it's not as organized as it could be," he says.  "But if a customer asks us for a book our people can find it right away."  In any case, he adds, Jessica's can and sometimes does toss in a bag of coffee beans as a customer incentive.
     The mother store itself has quietly undergone change as well under the laid-back guidance of Jon, who has still found time to build a very modest second career as a photographer of musicians, and an even more modest third career as a bassist for bands.  He has applied this same mixed focus to stocking an amalgam of new and bargain books that has proven one of the store's signature features.  While acquiring a larger selection of new hardcover and paperback books than even most superstores offer, Jon has maintained a vaster-than-ever collection of the same sort of steeply discounted damaged and publisher's excess books with which Louis Strymish grew the business.  To wring out the maximum discount, Jon will often negotiate for a publisher's entire stock of remainder or damaged books, as when he took 500 copies of Edward Gorey's "The Headless Bust"--a book that probably saw no order larger than a dozen from any other bookstore in the world.
     This sort of going out on a limb for books that have no obvious promise of finding an audience--and that aren't returnable to publishers if unsold--is virtually unheard of in the bookselling industry.  "The new-book business depresses me sometimes," he says.  "It's like a fashion business.  What sells is what was pushed on TV this week, and the rest get returned.  A bargain book gets sold because someone made a commitment to it out of faith that someone would buy it someday."  But the unpredictability of bargain books comes with rewards.  The large mish-mosh of odd books available for a song is not only one of Strymish's big draws, it's a money machine.  Although new books account for 70 percent of the store's revenues, bargain books make up 70 percent of the profits, because Jon gets them so cheaply that he can mark them up as much as 300 percent and still sell them for five dollars or less.  In a sense, new books, with their slim margins, are loss leaders at the Book Fair.
     Even the Book Fair's signature by-publisher organization is slowly mutating under improvisation and experimentation.  Jon lets employees set up subject-oriented sections whenever they feel like it and stock it with whatever books seem appropriate.  These categories don't always track the standard ones; there's a conventional travel section, but there's also a tattoo/body art section.  Employees sometimes get carried away with categorizing, as when one fellow set up 10 different religious sections; Jon himself started to have trouble finding books there, so he scaled it back to two sections.  Other employees have set up interesting blends of by-publisher and by-subject sections, so that, for example, a science-fiction section in paperbacks is perched alongside a section dedicated to books from science-fiction and fantasy publisher Wizards of the Coast.  Other books never make it into any sort of category--an employee will just randomly lay them out in the sea of bins and unlabeled display cases near the front for a customer to stumble over rather than intentionally look up.  "It's a mix of organizing styles," says Jon.  "It seems to happen naturally, and it seems to work okay.  My goal is to make sure changes don't happen so fast that they can't be reversed if they don't work.  But whatever you do, you're going to annoy someone."  Actually, it's hard to spot a single customer in the store who looks the least bit annoyed.  But then, that wouldn't include those first-timers who even today walk in and find the store so perplexing that they turn and flee.