He knows how to secede in business.

• Position: Tom Broadfoot - People

Some of Tom Broadfoot's best customers are Brits and Australians. And Belgians, too. "Brussels is a hotbed of Confederate sentiment," he notes.

Go figure.

Interest in the Lost Cause just keeps growing - and that means big sales for Broadfoot Publishing Co. of Wilmington, which sells old Civil War books and republishes many out-of-print ones.

Book sets are Broadfoot's publishing specialty His most popular is a 40-volume set of The Confederate Veteran, a magazine published in Memphis, Tenn., from 1892 to 1932. 'It's the Boy's Life for Confederate soldiers,- he says, filled with tall tales, reminiscences and obituaries. Broadfoot, 47, has nearly sold out the second printing of 2,200 sets at $1,500 a pop.

He has published a 128-volume set of War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies and a 54-volume set of the Southern Historical Society papers, the Dixie version. Now, he's working on a medical and surgical history of the war.

But Broadfoot is not a Civil War buff; his first love is North Carolina history. His father collected rare Southern books for Duke University, and young Broadfoot started collecting history books as a boy.

He graduated from the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn., in 1966. After a stint in the Navy, Broadfoot took his 2,000-book collection and opened an old-book store and mail-order business in Bayboro. He moved it to Wendell in 1971.

By the early '80s, so many people were getting into the history-book business that Broadfoot decided to get out. He started...