Get your motor running, head out to the…bookstore?

By Peter Applebome
June 8, 2006
THE NEW YORK TIMES
If someone was going to start a literary motorcycle club in New Jersey, it figured to be Alex Dawson. So, no surprise, there he was, leader of the pack on his Kawasaki Vulcan Classic, when the club roared out on its first road trip earlier this month to the house in Burlington, where James Fenimore Cooper was born.

O.K., it was just five members, but you have to start somewhere. "It's a very difficult demographic to mine, finding people who are interested in literature and motorcycles," he said.

But then Mr. Dawson, it turns out, is already an expert on mining difficult demographics. Witness his main gig, his attempt to start an independent literary bookstore, writers' salon and literary center of gravity in Metuchen, N.J. And, quite amazingly, a year and a half into the game, his bookstore, the Raconteur, has become slightly famous in literary circles in Brooklyn and Manhattan as well as Edison and New Brunswick, even if the jury is still out on whether anyone can make much of a living this way in the age of Amazon, Borders and Barnes & Noble.