Bookshelves ran from floor to ceiling on either side of the fireplace, and they accounted for my presence. A couple of days ago, Gordon Kyle Onderdonk had walked in off the street, dropping in at Barnegat Books as casually as someone looking to buy Drums in Our Street or sell Lepidopterae. He’d browsed for a spell, asked two or three reasonable questions, bought a Louis Auchincloss novel, and paused on his way to the door to ask me if I ever appraised libraries.

“I’m not interested in selling my books,” he said. “At least I don’t think I am, although I’m considering a move to the West Coast and I suppose I’d dispose of them rather than ship them. But I have things that have accumulated over the years, and perhaps I ought to have a floater policy to cover them in case of fire, and if I ever do want to sell, why, I ought to know whether my library’s worth a few hundred or a few thousand, oughtn’t I?”

I haven’t done many appraisals, but it’s work I enjoy. You can’t charge all that much, but the hourly return is greater than I get sitting behind the counter at the store, and sometimes the chance to appraise a library turns into the opportunity to purchase it. “Well, if it’s worth a thousand dollars,” a client may say, “what’ll you pay for it?” “I won’t pay a thousand,” I may counter, “so tell me what you’ll take for it.” Ah, the happy game of haggling.

I spent the next hour and a half with my legal pad and a pen, jotting numbers down and totting them up. I looked at all of the books on the open walnut shelves that flanked the fireplace, and in another room, a sort of study, I examined the contents of a bank of glassed-in mahogany shelves.

The library was an interesting one. Onderdonk had never specifically collected anything, simply allowing books to accumulate over the years, culling much of the chaff from time to time.