Book lover Scott Emerson hunts for Norman Rockwell — and finds him!

Scott Emerson has always loved books. He seems to have come into the world that way, without the influence of parents or peers. And his love of collecting began fairly early as well. “What really got me into books was that I collected Norman Rockwell illustrations when I was in my teens. I would go out to thrift stores and garage sales looking for Norman Rockwell material.” Sometimes, Emerson would find that Rockwell material; other times, books that he could sell or trade in order to grow his collection.

“For a high school age person in the ’70s, having any interest in Norman Rockwell was kind of weird, probably,” he acknowledges. Weird or no, it proved fruitful: Emerson knew that Rockwell had been painting and illustrating since 1916 or earlier. At some point, it occurred to him that the artist could still be alive. He found the name of the town that Rockwell lived in, wrote him a letter, and addressed it to what he hoped was his local post office — he didn’t have an actual mailing address to use. Happily, the good people at the Stockbridge Post Office got the letter to Rockwell, who responded to the young Californian. They carried on a correspondence for several years; not only did Emerson get to communicate with a personal hero, he also became one of the few people — or perhaps the only person — to own a signed copy of Rockwell’s first cover for the Saturday Evening Post.

The Rockwell collection was one among many that Emerson amassed and later sold over the decades. Others included carefully curated selections of California history, Eastern religions, Maurice Sendak, and animation.

All that collecting is what eventually got Emerson into the book trade. He started as a book scout, digging through yard sales, thrift shops, estate sales, and occasional local auctions for hidden treasures — which abounded in those heady days before the internet. He would bring his discoveries, 8 or 10 boxes at a time, to Wiliam Burgett, then-owner of San Diego’s Burgett’s Books. Eventually, Burgett stopped looking through the boxes and just began writing checks for Emerson. “My strongest talent in this business is finding the books; I’m still very good at that,” he tells me.

In the 1980s, Emerson took two separate cross-country scouting trips: he picked a freeway and took off for a month, sleeping in cheap motels. “In those days, there was actually a book called Booksellers in the USA or something, and you’d just have to find places to stop. I’d have to get out my Thomas Brothers map. I’d have no idea where I was going”. He made his living as a book scout for a good while, but eventually moved on to creating his own bookselling business, and also working for a few San Diego bookstores, including Adams Avenue Books for 25 years.

Nowadays, he runs Scott Emerson Books from his home, working in a solitude that he says he has “always been fine with.” As his TV plays Turner Classic Movies or sports in the corner, he spends much of his day writing descriptions, taking photographs, and going to the post office to mail orders. Three or four times a year Emerson takes some inventory on the road for book fairs. “In 50 years or so I’ve never lost that love of books”, he tells me. “I have a real passion for it.”