Restaurateur Tries to Stimulate an Appetite for Books : People: Marty Doyle makes 2,000 free titles available for his patrons. And they don’t have to order a thing.

UNION, Conn. — Though he only finished the seventh grade, Marty Doyle may be doing as much as anyone in New England to encourage people to sit down with a good book.

For the last decade, the 70-year-old Doyle has been giving away books at the Traveler Restaurant, a place where patrons are urged to make a choice from an estimated 2,000 titles lining the walls.

There’s no catch--and no charge. You don’t even have to buy a sandwich or a cup of coffee to take a book.

“We’ll give you a book if you just come in to use the restroom,” said Doyle, a friendly, gray-haired man with an aging athlete’s body and the flattened nose of a former boxer.

Doyle has worked at a variety of jobs over the last 50 years--including truck driver, plant salesman, short-order cook, motel manager and logger--but has always been an avid reader and book collector. He said he spends more than $10,000 a year seeking out and buying truckloads of used books.

“I’ve been doing this for 10 years,” he said. “Actually, it’s something that sort of got out of hand. I had about 30,000 books piled up around my house and my wife finally got fed up one day and said something had to go--it was either me or the books.”

So he hauled a few cartons over to the restaurant and invited his customers to help themselves to the books. They did, and a tradition was born.

“Initially, I just planned to give away a few of my extra books,” he said. “But last year I gave away 100,000 books. That comes to about 50 tons of books.”

In January, Doyle sold the restaurant to two of his employees, but as part of the deal he’ll continue to supply the restaurant with free books.

“I promised to keep the shelves stocked, whether it takes 100,000 or 125,000,” he said.

Doyle gets his books from a variety of sources, including libraries, estate sales, bookstore auctions, flea markets and anonymous donors.

“It’s not unusual to find a carton of books by the front door,” he said. “I just bought 15,000 books from a man in Fall River, Mass., and when a Cambridge woman, a former customer, died recently, she left us about 1,500 books from her library.”

Doyle keeps about 30,000 books in a barn and outbuilding behind the rustic restaurant, which sits beside Interstate 84 midway between Boston and Hartford. Whenever the restaurant’s supply gets low, Doyle takes in a few boxes from the barn.

Many of the restaurant’s customers are regulars who say they stop by as much for the books as for the food.

“I come in every couple of weeks to browse,” said Bill Peters, a retired librarian at the University of Connecticut. “This is a great place to find obscure books from the ‘30s and ‘40s. Marty has given me a lot of books over the years.”

Doyle doesn’t catalogue the books on the restaurant’s shelves. A copy of the Reader’s Digest Condensed Books may be found next to “Waiting For Godot” or “Vanity Fair.”

But customers who want to browse among catalogued books can visit the bookstore beneath the restaurant.

“I opened the bookstore a couple of years ago. It was a sort of unexpected spinoff, but we now have 35,000 books down there,” said Doyle, who will continue to run the bookstore and plans to open a gift shop next to the restaurant.

Bob Weeks, a traveling salesman from Sharon, Mass., said he seldom goes downstairs to the bookstore because he likes to be surprised when he wanders among the restaurant bookshelves.

“I usually try and pick out a book for my wife. She’s the reader in the family,” Weeks said as he attacked a hot turkey sandwich and scanned a copy of “The People’s Pharmacy,” a consumer’s guide to prescription drugs.

He said he discovered the restaurant four years ago.

“I stopped in by happenstance,” he said. “I was hungry.”

He has been coming back ever since.

“I represent several food service equipment companies, so I know a good restaurant when I see one,” Weeks said. “In this place you can find a good book and get a good meal. I’ve never seen anyplace like it.”

Doyle said he never dreamed he would become a bookstore owner and literary philanthropist when he was growing up on a farm near North Adams, Mass., during the Great Depression. He quit school after the seventh grade, not because he didn’t like going to class, but because he had to go to work and help feed the family.

“But I always read,” he said. “I read pulp magazines. Doc Savage, The Shadow, things like that. Later, I moved on to Max Brand and Zane Grey. I used to hide out behind the barn with a book when I was supposed to be tending the cows. I caught more hell for reading than for anything else I’ve ever done.”

Doyle doesn’t read as much as he used to, now that he’s up to his ears in books.

“I scan a lot of books now, but when you’re handling 100,000 books a year you don’t have much time to read them,” he said.

But he’s not complaining.

“I love fooling with books,” he said. “And people are so friendly, when they realize you’re giving them a book and there’s no gimmick attached. Everybody said nobody reads anymore, but I’ve found that there are still plenty of book people out there.”