There were some sets in leather-a nice Hawthorne, a Defoe, the inevitable Dickens. There were perhaps a dozen Limited Editions Club volumes, which command a nice price, and several dozen Heritage Press books, which retail for only eight or ten dollars but are very easy to turn over. He had some favorite authors in first editions-Evelyn Waugh, J.P. Marquand, John O’Hara, Wallace Stevens. Some Faulkner, some Hemingway, some early Sherwood Anderson. Fair history, including a nice set of Guizot’s France and Oman ’s seven-volume history of the Peninsular War. Not much science. No Lepidopterae.

He had cost himself money. Like so many non-collectors, he’d disposed of the dust jackets of most of his books, unwittingly chucking out the greater portion of their value in the process. There are any number of modern firsts worth, say, a hundred dollars with a dust jacket and ten or fifteen dollars without it. Onderdonk was astonished to learn this. Most people are.

He brought more coffee as I sat adding up a column of figures, and this time he’d brought along a bottle of Irish Mist. “I like a drop in my coffee,” he said. “Can I offer you some?”

It sounded yummy, but where would we be without standards? I sipped my coffee black and went on adding numbers. The figure I came up with was somewhere in excess of $5,400, and I read it off to him. “I was probably conservative,” I added. “I’m doing this on the spot, without consulting references, and I shaded things on the low side. You’d be safe rounding that figure off at six thousand.”

“And what would that figure represent?”

“Retail prices. Fair market value.”

“And if you were buying the books as a dealer, presuming of course that this type of material was something you were interested in-”

“I would be interested,” I allowed. “For this sort of material I could work on fifty percent.”

“So you could pay three thousand dollars?”