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Hell's Readers
“I have this urge, a compulsion really, to turn the basic idea of a bookstore on its ear,” says Alex Dawson (above), co-owner and manager of the Raconteur, a used bookshop in Metuchen.
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The Raconteur (raconteurbooks.com) not only sells new and used books and organizes screenings of film classics, it also runs a motorcycle club for book-loving bikers. Every summer and fall, the club sets out on a series of motorcycle treks to “sites of literary or cinematic interest.” Previous excursions explored William Carlos Williams’s Paterson, and Blairstown, where Friday the 13th was shot.
Dawson, who rides a “low-slung Vulcan Classic with a custom Mustang seat,” is the leader of the Raconteur’s literary pack, which includes Francis Schott, owner of two New Brunswick restaurants, Stage Left and Catherine Lombardi; sci-fi fan Stu Segal, owner/manager of the Sport Honda Powerhouse in Metuchen; Kyo Morishima, a fine-art photographer; and Kristy Lauricella, an English teacher at Summit High School (and Dawson’s fiancée).
The club plans an August 9 run to various Jersey sites featured in the Oscar-nominated movie The Wrestler. In October, the group heads out to Carson McCullers’s house in Nyack, New York; the Seaman’s Bethel in New Bedford, Massachusetts, immortalized in Moby Dick; and the boyhood home of Eugene O’Neill in New London, Connecticut.
They also are planning a visit to Walt Whitman’s self-designed tomb in Camden. Lunch is planned. “We’ll brown-bag it and try to eat something thematically linked to each author,” Dawson explains. For the Camden trip, he’s pondering a Whitman’s chocolate sampler.
