Bookseller Chuck Roberts has an anti-KonMari philosophy: buy everything and sort it all out later.

Chuck Roberts, proprietor of Wonder Book, has over six million books under his watch, of which about two and a half million are currently for sale online. Another three million are waiting to be sorted, and the remaining one million volumes are shared between the three brick-and-mortar stores that Wonder Book operates in Maryland. It’s an inventory large enough to make most booksellers’ jaws drop. And it’s the polar opposite of the small, highly curated inventory of many of the young sellers just entering the trade.

Roberts, perhaps alone in the greater book world, practices a leave-nothing-behind type of book purchasing. Wonder Book almost always purchases entire collections. But Roberts’ model, which he calls “nose-to-tail bookselling,” not only works but works so well that Wonder Book stands out as a remarkable, contrarian success story in the world of antiquarian bookselling.

“We don’t turn any books away if acquiring them is viable,” said Roberts. “It is also a challenging ‘game’ to find a use for each book, whether it be [sold] for pennies or donated or marketed for thousands of dollars. In most cases we are the only bookseller willing to buy the books we get. If we didn’t acquire them, their fate would likely be oblivion.”

Helping books to avoid oblivion is a particular passion for this bookseller.

“In the back of my mind is a kind of romantic, anthropomorphic feeling about books. What would happen to almost all the books we get if we didn’t buy them at the stores?”

To handle the sheer volume of incoming books each week, Wonder Book has set up a complex, highly tuned filtering system to sort the wheat from the chaff.

“Casting a wide net but controlling what happens with each catch so each book gets the best outcome possible,” is how Roberts summarized his mission. “We work hard to be sure nothing wonderful slips through… I think the model works very well.”