“Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.” —Parker Palmer



The close-knit Gloucester community of Lanesville is a town within a town, with some of its most notable clans dating back several generations. Not long ago, you could get all your needs met within one three-quarter-mile stretch of Langsford Street, where Gregory Gibson lives with his family. He points out his window to where there used to be a gas station, a butcher shop, a general market and a trolley that connected to the center of town — now mere memories of a simpler time.

Originally from Athol, Gibson first stumbled on Cape Ann during a college fishing trip with a friend in 1967. He explains: “We’re driving along Route 133 into Gloucester Harbor. As I’m looking out at the landscape, it’s like this religious experience, and I understand that this is where I’m going to spend the rest of my life.”

Gibson settled permanently in Gloucester in 1971 after a stint in the Navy. He would go on to meet his wife here, raise three children in the Gloucester school system and open an antiquarian bookstore in 1976 that survives to this day.

Ten Pound Island Book Company was named after the granite outcropping in the middle of Gloucester Harbor, home to little more than a lighthouse and a bevy of gulls. Gibson sells books about Cape Ann geography and history, but he specializes in “old, rare and out-of-print books, manuscripts and charts pertaining to the sea.” His principal clients are research libraries and academic institutions that have a vested interest in preserving and analyzing historical texts.

Gibson sums up his business model in one sentence: “I buy things that don’t exist and I sell them to people who don’t know they want them.”

He is sort of a literary archaeologist in this way, uncovering one-of-a kind compositions — war diaries, for example, or your great-grandfather’s journal of his voyage to the U.S. from Europe.