The business is Barnegat Books, an antiquarian bookstore on East Eleventh Street between University Place and Broadway. The Paddington is fourteen blocks north of my shop, and north-south blocks in Manhattan run twenty to the mile, and I’ll leave it to you to do the mathematics. I wanted to open up by two, as the sign on my door promised, but a few minutes one way or the other wouldn’t matter, and it was too nice a day for a cab or a subway. I’d come up by taxi, suitcase in tow, but I could walk back, and did.

I cut through Madison Square, paying my respects to the statue of Chester Alan Arthur, twenty-first President of the United States and a man with even more first names than Jeffrey Peters. I walked down Broadway, trying to remember what I knew about Chester Alan Arthur, and once I got the store open and dragged the bargain table (“Your Choice 3 for $5”) out front, I browsed through my own stock until I found The Lives of the Presidents, by William Fortescue. It had been published in 1925, and only went as far as Warren Gamaliel Harding (one first name, one last name, and one that was essentially a toss-up). The book was evidently written with a teenage audience in mind, though I couldn’t think of too many teenagers who’d rush to turn off MTV and check out what Fortescue had to say about Franklin Pierce and Rutherford Birchard Hayes (who could boast, you’ll notice, not a single first name between them).