I hadn’t sold quite as many as I’d bought, and so I generally had a few sets on hand, one on the shelves and a couple in cartons in the back. On this particular Wednesday I had four sets in stock, because I’d bought one the previous afternoon, not out of a mad passion to corner the market but because it was part of a lot that included some eminently resalable Steinbeck and Faulkner firsts. By the time I closed the store Tuesday I’d recovered my costs by placing To a God Unknown and In Dubious Battle with a regular customer, and I was thus feeling well disposed toward the Durants, so much so that I decided I might as well find out what they had to say about the sum total of human history.

So that’s what had my attention when she walked into my store, and into my life.

It was a perfect spring day, the kind of magical New York afternoon that makes you wonder why anyone would voluntarily live anywhere else. My door was wide open, so the little bell attached to it did not tinkle at her entrance. My cat, Raffles, often greets customers, rubbing against their ankles in a shameless bid for attention; on this occasion he lay on the windowsill in a patch of sunlight, doing his famous impression of a dishrag.

Even so, I knew I had a visitor. I got the merest glimpse of her out of the corner of my eye, then caught a whiff of her perfume as she crossed in front of the counter and disappeared behind a row of bookshelves.

I didn’t look up. I was somewhere in the second or third chapter, reading about cannibalism. Specifically, I was reading about some tribe-I forget who, but you could look it up, I’ll give you a good price on the books-some tribe that never held funerals, never had to make the hard choice between burial and cremation. They ate their dead.

I tried to read on, but my mind was awhirl with a vision of a modern world in which the practice had become universal. Frank Campbell, I realized, would be a society caterer. Walter B. Cooke would own a great chain of fast-food restaurants. In Queens, the Long Island Expressway would be lined not with graveyards but with hotdog stands, and-