Who are his customers?

Mizrahi sells to book lovers like himself — people who love first editions and search for rare manuscripts and old letters. He hopes they love the scent of the past clinging to these texts like the lost stories of their previous owners, just as much as he does. His customers range from academics with specific interests to nostalgic individuals. Children’s books from the ’60s and ’70s, especially illustrated ones, represent a big market.

He also gets customers who have authors among their ancestors looking for anything their relatives might have written or published.

Mizrahi has sold Yiddish books to the University of Jordan and to the University of Tokyo. He has a customer who works in a mine in the Arctic Circle, a convert to Judaism who only spends six months out of every year above ground. He has a client who is a Holocaust denier — a Jewish Holocaust denier — with a radio show. He has sold to a customer in Qatar — first some English-Hebrew dictionaries, then some anti-Zionist works. To offset any nefarious purposes the client might have, Mizrahi included a few free books that had a more balanced perspective on Zionism and which he hoped might alter the customer’s perspective.

Customers have flown in from London or driven in from Montreal. Many ultra-Orthodox men come in looking for unusual material. “You get to see the dark side of some rabbinic interests,” Mizrahi said. “I have a lot of Orthodox rabbis come in here for the kfira” — heretical or banned books. (Ungar-Sargon)

While he does supply books to many people, there are two main threats to future commerce — people do not read as much as they used to and most of his business is on eBay.