Book 11 in the Alex Cooper series, 2009

My earliest childhood memories of books are of those from which my mother read to me every night before I went to sleep. I still have the frayed volumes of poems by Robert Louis Stevenson and A. A. Milne, and the stories of Beatrix Potter and E. B. White. I remember the first time she took me to the public library in our small city, and with what delight I left that day carrying the three books the librarian entrusted to me. Our favorite weekly excursion-an hour of pure happiness with my mother-was the trip downtown to return the small stack I had selected and replace it with another.

Most bibliophiles love reading about books, too, and for me, the opportunity to do some of my research with literary treasures was a thrilling experience. One foundation for my exploration was a 1923 tome I picked up at an antiquarian book fair-Harry Miller Lydenberg’s History of the New York Public Library. I studied Phyllis Dain’s A Universe of Knowledge, Nicholas Basbanes’s A Gentle Madness, Ingrid Steffensen’s The New York Public Library: A Beaux Arts Landmark, and a slim little book published by Educare Press, The Waldseemüller World Map (1507).

One of the most riveting articles I relied on for an understanding of the world of rare map collectors appeared in The New Yorker’s Annals of Crime, called “A Theft in the Library” by William Finnegan. As always, my research notebooks were teeming with clippings from the New York Times, whether about the structural bones of Manhattan buildings or transparency in the boardroom’s of libraries and museums, or even the obituaries of long-forgotten individuals.