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The Marketplace of Ideas

Fifty years on, students still love browsing Bill Nelson’s books on the SU porch.

Friday of O-week. Afternoon sunshine dapples the SU porch as new students browse the books on display under the shade of an old sycamore tree. A handsome edition of Tennyson sits cheek-by-jowl with a dog-eared copy of Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles. A soft breeze rustles the Complete Guitar Player and animates the Principles of Chinese Painting. One student contemplates Anna Karenina, while another shrieks in triumph over a 1946 edition of the Joy of Cooking. “Finally, my own copy!” she exclaims. “It’s like a rite of passage.”

Surveying the scene beneath a charcoal gray fedora, Bill Nelson ’62 cracks a wry grin. He has been buying and selling books at Reed for 50 years, virtually his entire adult life. His khakis may be worn and his shirt rumpled, but his eyes have lost none of their sapphire sparkle. Books are his hobby, his passion, and his profession. His collection, which totals more than 30,000 volumes, is like a hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy of ideas, touching on every conceivable subject from the Indians of the Pacific Northwest to sorcery in New Guinea. 

What keeps him coming back to the SU porch, however, is neither money (he doesn’t need it), nor any fetish for ink and paper, but rather the sense of camaraderie and kinship that books inspire—and the thrill of introducing students to new ideas for three dollars a pop.

Bill caught book fever young. In grade school, he would join his uncle on sorties to Portland’s legendary used bookstores, filling shopping bags with his discoveries. By the time he graduated from Grant High School and came to Reed, he had collected more than 1,000 titles. 

Reed gave his passion an intellectual focus. “Math 110 changed my life—literally,” he says. “It introduced me to the concept of mathematical proof and opened up a whole world—and I don’t mean just learning algorithms, I mean original thinking.” Inspired by professors such as Lloyd Williams ’35 [mathematics 1947–81], Joe Roberts [mathematics 1952–], Michael Litt [chemistry 1958–66], and Marsh Cronyn ’42 [chemistry 1952–89], Bill began to read more widely, and started scouring church sales, rummage sales, and library sales as his collection grew. 

In the early ’60s, Bill was involved in setting up a book gallery in the loft of the SU to raise money for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, an activist group opposed to segregation. Student interest in SNCC eventually waned, but Bill kept the book gallery going, even after he graduated from Reed in chemistry and got a job teaching math, chemistry, and physics at the Catlin Gabel school in Southwest Portland. (Catlin’s legendary annual rummage sale became another source of books.)

In 1970, the city of Beaverton bought Bill’s house by right of eminent domain, and he was suddenly faced with a big headache: what to do with his gargantuan collection, which by then occupied five entire rooms. In a flash of inspiration, he loaded a bunch of books in a trailer, hauled them to Reed, and set them out in the Quad. Thus began an itinerant tradition that would continue to this day. “It’s just so rewarding,” he says. “The students really appreciate the books.”

Over the years, Bill has perfected his formula. He doesn’t keep a regular schedule, because the first ingredient for a successful sale is a sunny day—a rare commodity in winter and spring. The next ingredient, of course, is the right selection. He hauls between two and three thousand books in his battered red ’85 Toyota pickup to the SU porch, and spends several hours arranging them to show off particularly unusual or beguiling titles. He has developed a sixth sense about titles that appeal to Reedies. “There has been incredible consistency,” he says. (See sidebar.)

Booksellers typically stay in business by selling rare books to wealthy collectors for a hefty fee. Bill turned that model upside down. His top price for Reed students is usually five dollars, whether the book is a well-thumbed Dr. Seuss or a first-edition Hemingway, and he sells most of them for two or three dollars. He is able to do this because he pursues a frugal lifestyle. “I enjoy growing and preparing my own food too much to ever even think of eating out,” he says. “And there has always been so much free reusable material and repairable equipment that the concept of shopping became largely irrelevant.”

Bill’s Thoreauvian lifestyle underwent some uxorial adjustments after he married Susan Olson, a genetics professor at OHSU, with whom he has raised three daughters, but he has faithfully returned to the SU porch, year after year. He has also been a loyal donor to the college. “I really appreciate the opportunity to be a student myself,” he says. “Reed changed my life and forged my interests. I feel a real debt to those years.”

By the end of the day, his throat is hoarse and his back is sore. It doesn’t matter. Students by the score have gone back to their dorms laden with literary treasures, made new discoveries, new connections, and new friends. For Bill, that’s reason enough to come back. 

Tags: Alumni, Campus Life