FOUNTAIN • The little block of a building with barred windows beside a used car lot gives no indication of the treasures kept inside.

“We’ve still gotta redo the sign out front,” says Bob DeWitt, motioning to the old sign for a gun shop.

Perhaps fittingly, there is no sign for the “Home of the Secret Bookshop.”

That’s what Colorado Springs people in-the-know have called the home of DeWitt’s collection. They know it to be a collection like no other — a vast and varied compendium of state history spanning thousands of titles.

“I think the only difference between him and a library is he doesn’t have a Dewey Decimal System,” says a local friend and fellow history buff, Don Sanborn.

Worry not — with an appointment, DeWitt can direct you to your topic of interest.

“Whatever you’re interested in,” Sanborn says, “more than likely he’s got it.”

Pick your town or ghost town. Pick your part of the plains or the peaks. Pick your industry of the past.

Pick your character: the lawman (Wyatt Earp) or the outlaw (Butch Cassidy); the famous (Horace Tabor) or the infamous (Alfred Packer); the chief (Ouray) or the “Queen of the Utes” (Chipeta); the Spanish explorer (Juan Bautista de Anza) or the American explorer (Kit Carson); the well-known “snowshoe itinerant” of the 1800s (John Dyer) or the lesser-known “Doc Susie” of the century’s turn (Susan Anderson).

Here’s one on Portia Lubchenco, considered Colorado’s first woman to head a hospital staff. Here’s a section labeled “naughty girls,” exploring historic brothels. Here’s a section on the San Luis Valley, including information on the reclusive, Catholic sect of Penitentes.

“Here’s an oddball guy from Kim, Colorado,” says DeWitt’s wife, Dorothy, grabbing a collection of 1950s editorials by a man named Victor L. Waters.

A man named Frank H. Cheley once caught Eric Swab’s interest in his decades of researching the Pikes Peak region.

Published in 1913, “‘Buffalo Roost’ was the first of about 18 books he wrote on the development of young men,” Swab said. “He went on to develop the Cheley Colorado Camps, which are popular with young people to this day. … I realize this is more of a promotion for Frank Cheley than Bob.”

But it makes the point on DeWitt: He seeks the obscure and unusual, those rare and barely printed publications otherwise lost to time.

“This is our first Colorado Springs directory,” DeWitt says, carefully flipping the yellowed pages between tattered, cloth covers.

There are other books on Colorado’s birds, plants, dinosaur records and geology. There are books about pioneer trails and cattle trails. About old forts, trading posts and stage stops. About railroading and mining.

“People tend to write about the gold and silver mining,” DeWitt says. “But coal mining, other than Ludlow, it’s not really written about all that much.”

That is the kind of content DeWitt seeks. More content is listed on the back of his business card, under “WANTED!” — old maps, letters, newspapers, menus, photos, stamps, tickets and other sorts of ephemera. Much of that is kept in long rows of binders here. In the next room, boxes of more books are stacked about as tall as DeWitt.

“We labeled 1,200 boxes,” he says.

Yes, he’s still unpacking from his move here to Fountain earlier this year.

He was previously in the back of the Western Jubilee, the warehouse and recording studio overseen by Scott O’Malley. Before his death in 2023, O’Malley hosted live music there at the old freight house beside the tracks, welcoming audiences to the “Home of the Secret Concerts.”

Hence the nickname for DeWitt’s collection. And true to the name, the “Home of the Secret Bookshop” was mostly only found by those who sought it. Those like Don Kallaus, a longtime lover of Colorado history. He owns Rhyolite Press, which specializes in the subject.

Having met many over his time in the state dating back to the ’60s, DeWitt “is probably the most driven historian I’ve ever known,” Kallaus says. “He’s always got a project, always looking for something new and exciting, always meeting new historians that are making presentations.”

As one does when one is a member of nearly 30 historical groups near and far. It is through these groups, through the people he meets with similar niche interests, that DeWitt has been able to build his collection.

“He’s always out there, like a bloodhound looking for that unusual or rare or esoteric, one-of-a-kind thing,” Kallaus says. “He has that in his blood.”

DeWitt has been a searcher since his boyhood in New York City, since he laid eyes on a metal detector displayed in a Macy’s window. That was in the ’70s, when he was traveling to arts and crafts shows with his family of makers. Colorado was one stop. DeWitt would never leave.

He liked to fish and ski. “And there was all this history with ghost towns, which I was not really familiar with at the time,” he says.

He would get more familiar upon joining Colorado Springs’ metal detecting club in 1984.

“They said, Well, we need to find outings, places for the club to go,” DeWitt recalls — such as abandoned places that boomed in the mining days. “That’s really what got me into all this history stuff.”

Just as he dug, he searched for material above ground that provided the same thrill of discovery. He grew his book collection while working in software. In 2002, he left the computer business to focus on a business that would be something like a library — a bookshop but also a resource hub for fellow seekers.

One recently was a woman DeWitt met while in Pueblo for the annual convention of the Oregon-California Trails Association. The woman was working on a thesis regarding a certain eastern Colorado outpost near Nebraska.

Did DeWitt have anything on Julesburg? she wondered. Yes, he did.

And yes, for another recent inquiry regarding the 1960s-era Rex Hotel in Colorado Springs, DeWitt was able to provide. The researcher wondered more about Fort Carson and that era around town, and DeWitt provided more.

“He was just really thrilled with this pile of stuff I had for him,” DeWitt says. “I probably spent a lot more time doing the search than perhaps was worthwhile from a business standpoint. … But it’s not all about the money. I guess the life of a bookseller is more related to the life of a starving artist.”

His appetite seems insatiable. He’s always hungry for more obscure books, but he seems equally eager to direct people beyond his shop.

“He’s always cross-connecting people,” Kallaus says. “Whenever you bring up a subject, he knows someone you need to meet, or knows somewhere you need to go.”

First, people need to find him. “A lot of people don’t know we exist,” DeWitt says.

And that, he knows, is because the “Secret Bookshop” hardly exists on the internet. “We need to start to work on the social media,” he says.

But he says he’s been “reluctant, hesitant” — not unlike his approach to the digitization of historic material. The trend has been helpful, he knows.

But he knows nothing like a book.

“It’s the smell and the feel, the old paper,” he says.

It’s like he’s transported to the time and place from which the book came, he explains. This also explains his passion for metal detecting.

“So many things you find, you gotta figure out more about,” he says.

Take a can, for example — an old tobacco can, an oyster can, a can of unknown origin.

“There’s different types of cans, and they’re usually so rusted you can’t tell anything about them,” he says. “But sometimes there’s just a little bit of paint on it still.”

Just enough to keep him searching.

If You Go:

Appointments are recommended to visit the “Home of the Secret Bookshop,” 404 N. Santa Fe Ave., Fountain. Call 473-0330 or email books@dewittenterprises.com