Neal Rubin: Bookstock bargains abound as Michigan's largest used book sale returns

I can say with resounding confidence that this is the first time Reggie Harding and Dr. Stanley Levy have ever occupied the same paragraph. The connecting thread is Bookstock.

Harding was 7 feet of unfulfilled potential, an almost mythological Detroit-born basketball player and frequent criminal who once pulled a nylon stocking over his head and robbed his east-side neighborhood liquor store.

"Cut it out, Reggie," the proprietor said to the only giant on the block, to which Harding protested, "It ain’t me, man!"

Levy was a pioneer in nuclear medicine who knew Albert Einstein, treated and befriended Jack Kevorkian, and amassed an astonishing collection of staggeringly old books. He built a 2,500-square-foot addition to his home in Bloomfield Hills to hold only some of them.

The connection, as previously noted, is Michigan’s largest used book and media sale. Bookstock, having already distributed more than $2.5 million across 18 years for literacy and education projects, returns to Laurel Park Place in Livonia next Sunday through April 30 with more than 400,000 books, audio books, CDs, DVDs and vinyl records.

A Harding story I’d never heard in detail popped up in a trade paperback I bought at last year’s sale for $3 or $4. A chunk of Levy’s collection will be available this year, and it’s a trifle more expensive — but you’d expect that of a 1931 first edition of "Brave New World" or all eight volumes of "Rollin's Ancient History" from 1808, and we’re offering his books at 50% of the appraised prices.

I use "we" because I'm the honorary chair of an all-volunteer sale that's even bigger than Reggie Harding, with carefully sorted merchandise atop clusters of tables from end to end at the mall. Cookbooks and kids' books, history and mystery, fitness and finance ... it's all part of a literary recycling drive in which books find new homes so that we can help even more people learn to read and relish them.

Children's books start at 50 cents, with most at $1, which is also the price of most paperbacks. Trade paperbacks cost $3, as do most hardbounds. Newer hardcovers are $4.

Since there's no way to display 400,000 items at once unless we take over the Von Maur department store, which would seem ungrateful, fresh merchandise gets trundled out every day. It was midweek when I came across "Loose Balls," author Terry Pluto's raucous 1990 oral history of the American Basketball Association.

Harding first appears on page 139. You might soon be able to see it for yourself, because when Bookstock kicks off with a presale on April 23, I'm stashing "Loose Balls" back in the sports section so it can rebound into someone else's fortunate hands.

A life stranger than fiction

About that presale: It runs from 8:15 a.m. to 11 a.m., with a $20 entry fee to join the first wave of shoppers. Otherwise, Bookstock hours are 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Monday through Saturday, and 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Sundays.

About that Reggie? Lordamercy, where to start. When he's introduced on page 139, Indiana Pacers executive Mike Storen is saying, "You don't think about signing a guy like Reggie Harding unless you're desperate, and we were."

The condensed version of what sounds like a tall tale has Harding leading Eastern High to three city championships from 1959-61, playing well for the Pistons in the mid-'60s when he could be enticed to show up, getting convicted of assaulting a police officer over a parking ticket, and resurfacing with the Pacers in 1968.

With the Pacers, according to accounts in "Loose Balls," he was granted time off for the funeral of his daughter, though it turned out he didn't have one. His roommate on a road trip once woke up at midnight to find Harding pointing a gun at him; after pacifying the 7-footer and emptying the weapon, the roommate found Harding looming over him again a bit later with fresh bullets.

The roommate packed up and slept in the lobby. Harding stuck around long enough to get suspended for the league playoffs and tell a TV interviewer, "And if I had a gun, I'd shoot Mike Storen."

With that as a capper to his basketball career, he came home to Detroit, where he once escaped police custody and resurfaced at a hospital a week later with gunshot wounds in both legs.

He's remembered as a tragicomic figure, but, realistically, the comedy was inadvertent and the tragedy was omnipresent. After an altercation at Tiger's Liquor Store on Kercheval in 1972, he was sitting on the steps of a nearby dry cleaner when the man who had slapped him shot him to death.

He was 30 years old, and already largely forgotten — but remembered in a 33-year-old book worth picking up at Bookstock, if someone else doesn't find it first.

Two years of vintage Levys

The Levy collection will be easier to locate, and with more than 1,000 volumes in this year's installment, we won't run out.

Stanley Levy died in 2020 at 94. His younger son, Robert, delivered four pallets of his treasures to Laurel Park Place on Thursday in a Penske truck.

They were wheeled into a storefront near the food court, where they'll be sold along with other clearly valuable treasures that deserve shelves rather than tabletops. The hope is to have a list of the Levy books posted at BookstockMI.org before the sale starts, and if we master that, we'll do the same for the 4,000 remaining books from the good doctor in 2024.

Robert says his dad built the collection across nearly 70 years to reflect an array of interests: politics, medicine, history, sexuality, disruptive literature, philosophy, a certain renowned physicist and more.

Accepted into an accelerated program at Princeton after joining the Navy as a teenager during World War II, Levy met Einstein there at a Passover seder. He considered his many books by and about Einstein to be the centerpiece of his library.

Levy “never threw out anything,” said Robert, 66, and left instructions that the voluminous inventory “should be put to good use.”

Since Levy was a devoted Bookstock shopper, the sale seemed like a logical beneficiary. Having licensed the software from the viaLibri.net search engine for old and rare books, Robert said, he arrived at lowest comparable prices for everything he donated.

Bookstock will charge half of that, putting “Brave New World” at $50, the “Rollin’s Ancient History” set at $250, an 1869 leatherbound copy of Mark Twain’s “Innocents Abroad” for $125, and “The Greatest Book in the World” at $4.

That’s the actual title. It’s about book collecting, from 1925, and if it’s not truly the greatest book, it still might be a heck of a Bookstock bargain.

Check out the Bookstock website for information on things like teacher appreciation days, the 12-paperbacks-for-$5 special on Saturday, and more. To gush to Neal Rubin about your amazing Bookstock finds, try NARubin@freepress.com or hit @nealrubin_fp on Twitter.

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This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Rubin: Bookstock, MIchigan's largest charity used book sale, is back