It’s no secret that brothers fight.

Put two brothers in the same room and, often in a matter of minutes, you’ll see two functioning adults transform into sucking masses of love, resentment, loyalty and frustration.

On the other hand, a relationship between brothers can outlast friendships, survive decades-long arguments and rise above the kind of betrayals that would end most marriages.

“It’s like being born with a tumor,” says local bookseller Sam Hyde, 64. “You can’t picture life without it.”

The specific tumor Hyde is referring to is his brother, Joel Hyde, 63.

If he had his druthers, Joel, also a bookseller, would rather be compared to something else. That said, he probably understands where his brother is coming from.

Parting of ways

At one time, Sam and Joel Hyde were more than brothers. They were business partners, co-owners of Hyde Brothers Booksellers, the dusty, crowded and cozy used bookstore on Wells Street.

The partnership lasted 10 years and both Sam and Joel describe the parting as amicable. But it was also fraught with long discussions about what Sam owed Joel and vice versa. The process of divvying up the store’s inventory alone was a slow process, Sam says.

At one point, Joel asked Sam what he would pay for the paperbacks Joel was leaving behind.

“Nothing,” Sam said.

And the discussions would start all over again.

Until then, the two ran different aspects of their business. While quiet, bespectacled Joel traveled solo to book shows, Sam stayed in the store, earning a reputation as a dry-witted, professorial bookseller who favored sweatpants over corduroys. And as long as business was booming, it worked.

“Then the economy started to go sour,” Joel says. “That’s when the divisions became apparent and seemed significant.”

Sam wanted the store to cater to a broad audience. Something for everyone, he said. Joel, on the other hand, wanted to sell a small amount of books to a select clientele. With no compromise in sight, they decided to go their separate ways.

And, being brothers, they did it in the most difficult way possible.

Armed with banana boxes and ladders, they looked through the books – 150,000 of them piled on the floor, overflowing from shelves, stuffed into carousels in the middle of aisles – and picked out every second book.

“It seemed a fair distribution,” Sam says. “One for me, one for you.”

About a year later, Joel opened his own bookstore on Crescent Avenue.

He called it, fittingly, Every Other Book.

Different businesses

It has taken Sam more than a year to refill the shelves at Hyde Brothers.

Across town at Every Other Book, the shelves are identical – full but not spilling onto the floor the way they did when Sam and Joel worked together at Hyde Brothers.

“We’ve really pared down,” Sam says. “But the business won’t allow us not to. The Internet – buying a book on Amazon for 1 cent plus shipping – has changed the game. It’s been brutal.”

Both stores are perfumed by the musty smell of yellowing paper and book glue. Both use the same system of organizing books by subject with narrow, handwritten signs. Both stores are ripe for wandering around without the foggiest idea of what kind of a book you hope to find.

The majority of the differences have to do with the man behind the counter.

Unlike Hyde Brothers, Every Other Book keeps decorating to a minimum. A stuffed raven wearing a Santa hat and a collection of stuffed penguins grace a couple of shelves. Everything else is easily within reach of proper dusting. It’s smaller too – only one story to Hyde Brothers’ two stories – and quiet.

Unlike Sam, who is surrounded by a handful of longtime employees he has nicknamed “The Crew,” Joel works alone, happy to chat occasionally with a customer or two.

“The great discovery of opening my own store is that I’m not the curmudgeon I always thought I was,” Joel says.

Ask and he’ll point out a few other differences, too.

“This store is tidier and better lit,” Joel says. “And I don’t have any cats. Because that is something I would never do.”

Over at Hyde Brothers, a gray cat named Smoky prowls the two-story building, often standing on the counter with its backside toward a customer’s face or curled up on a comfortable chair.

Photographs, newspaper articles, signs, posters and fliers cover the walls; nostalgic detritus lines the shelves.

When a customer wants to know where the mystery books are located, Sam tugs at his beard and directs them using signposts.

“You’ll see my dad’s old trombone hanging up down there,” he’ll say in a quiet, scratchy voice. “Turn left when you see it.”

Despite the differences, there is one similarity the two share. Both Sam and Joel have a pat response for anyone looking for a hard-to-find book: Call my brother.

“He thinks I’m reasonably intelligent,” Sam says. “I feel the same way about him.”

“Keep it in the family,” Joel says. “The more the merrier. We get along fine as brothers, just not as business partners.”

Book love shared

If you ask Sam, he’ll tell you he taught Joel how to read. According to Joel, he could read before kindergarten and that’s all you really need to know.

Both men say reading was a family pastime in the Hyde home. Unlike the other television-addicted fathers on the block, Sam and Joel’s dad, a geology teacher and wrestling coach, would come home at night, eat dinner, kick off his shoes and read a book.

Their mother was an English and reading tutor who read “The Wizard of Oz” to her sons before bed.

Television wasn’t a priority for their sons, either.

Shows such as “The Mickey Mouse Club” annoyed the serious-minded Joel. Appalled him, he says, and made him gravitate toward books.

“I couldn’t stand anything that treated me like a child,” he says. “I didn’t like superhero comic books, either.”

By the time he was 10 years old, he’d dragged himself through his father’s collection of books about World War II. And on his first day of junior high school, bored by his English teacher’s lecture, he flipped ahead in his text and read “To Build a Fire” by Jack London.

“It made the hair on my back stand up,” he says. “It was real. It wasn’t sentimental. I didn’t know there were stories where things could turn out the way they really would in real life.”

Sam, on the other hand, was on the football team at North Side High School. “The far end of the bench,” he admits. He was laid-back, not too concerned with his subpar trombone playing in the band or his lack of football expertise. Eventually, he gave the rowdy world of football up for a part-time job at Putt-Putt and more time to read science fiction. (“I read it ruthlessly,” he says.)

“I was a kid who spent summers chasing butterflies on my grandpa’s farm,” he says. “I wasn’t so much into pain. I didn’t like actually hurting.”

Both brothers ended up English majors. And like many English majors before them, they went on to paint houses (Joel), manage fast-food restaurants (Sam) and amass huge book collections after graduation.

It was only after the two read the career-based self-help book “What Color Is Your Parachute?” that they realized that an English degree, a love of reading and a big book collection could be the beginning of a career.

“We were both surrounded by books at home,” Joel says. “Sam had a couple thousand paperbacks alone. I told Sam I was thinking about become a bookseller. Sam said he was thinking the same thing.”

“And it worked,” Sam says. “For 10 years. And that’s not bad for brothers.”

Future prospects

Sam and Joel have different opinions about the future of the book business. While Sam takes the view that bookstores are coming to an end, ready to be replaced by digital books, e-readers and mail order, Joel believes there will always be a place for the tangible bookstore.

“Without bookstores you lose the capacity for people to escape their prejudices and find contrary and unexpected information,” Joel says. “The Internet is not about encouraging you to expand your horizons.”

Sam disagrees. He plans on riding it out until retirement. It’s obvious young people aren’t reading books the same way older people do, he says.

“And there’s only one problem with that,” he says. “You can’t pick up chicks in a bookstore if you’re at home reading a Kindle.”

Sam and Joel don’t see each other often, but this isn’t uncommon for them. They talk on the phone once in a while, usually when one has a book-related question for the other. And around his birthday this year, Joel came to Sam’s house for brunch. The two ate homemade aebleskiver, the small Danish pancakes of their ancestors.

So there’s no need to worry about their relationship, Sam says. They’re brothers.

“We’ll see each other again next year.”

edowns@jg.net