“You could probably make this enterprise profitable,” he said. “Throw out ninety-five percent of this junk and specialize in high-ticket collector items. That way you could make do with a tenth the square footage. You could get off the street and run the whole operation out of an upstairs office, or even out of your home. But I don’t want to tell you how to run your business.”

“You’re already telling me to get out of it.”

“Am I supposed to support you in a doomed enterprise? I’m not in business for my health.”

“But,” I said.

“But what?”

“But you’re a patron of the arts,” I said. “I saw your name in the Times last week. You donated a painting to a fund-raising auction to benefit the New York Public Library.”

“My accountant advised it,” he said. “Explained to me how I’ll save more in taxes than I’d have made selling the painting.”

“Still, you have literary interests. Bookstores like this one are a cultural asset, as important in their own way as the library. You can hardly fail to appreciate that. As a collector—”

“An investor.”

I pointed at “B” Is for Burglar. “An investment?”

“Of course, and a hell of a good one. Women crime writers are a hot item right now. Alibi was less than fifteen dollars when it was published a dozen or so years ago. Do you know what a mint copy with dust jacket will bring now?”

“Not offhand.”

“Somewhere around eight-fifty. So I’m buying Grafton, I’m buying Nancy Pickard, I’m buying Linda Barnes. I have a standing order at Murder Ink for every first novel by a female author, because how can you tell who’s going to turn out to be important? Most of them won’t ever amount to much, but this way I don’t have to worry about missing the occasional book that jumps from twenty dollars to a thousand in a few years’ time.”

“So you’re just interested in investment,” I said.