I had the front door closed against the chill of the morning, and so I got to hear the tinkling of little bells each time it opened. I had a couple of early browsers, rang up two sales for a few dollars each, and looked through the sack of books that Mowgli brought me. He’s a curious creature who looks as though he might indeed have been raised by wolves-gaunt, hollow-eyed, with a mop of hair and a scraggle of beard. Speed and acid have burned some substantial holes in his brain, and he’d dropped out of a doctoral program in English at Columbia to take up a nomadic existence, shifting his residence from one abandoned building to another as circumstances dictated.

He’d collected books during his student days, and on the way down he sold them off piecemeal. His stock was pretty much gone by the time he found his way to Barnegat Books, but I’d bought a few things from him then, including a nice clean set of Kipling. He’d disappeared for the better part of a year, and I gather he started sucking on a crack pipe and pretty much lost touch with the planet for a while there, but when he turned up again he had his act together, in a marginal sort of way. He nowadays limited his chemical adventures to a little righteous herb and the odd hit of organic mescaline, and supported himself by buying books at street fairs and thrift shops and flea markets and reselling them to people like me.

I picked out a few things, passed on the rest. He had some nice fifties paperback noir, David Goodis and Peter Rabe, but my customers wouldn’t pay collector prices for that kind of material. “Figured as much,” he said. “I’ll run these by Jon at Partners and Crime. Thought you might like to see them, though. Don’t you love the covers?”

I agreed they were great. I picked out a biography of Thomas Wolfe and Mark Schorer’s life of Sinclair Lewis and a couple of other books I thought I could sell, and we hemmed and hawed until we found a price we could both live with. Toward the end I asked him a question I ask most of my regular suppliers.