There was no open wall space to hang the framed prints for sale, so Hogarth’s scenes of lust, pride, and debauchery leaned rakishly against piles of novels, folk tales, and literary theory. In the back room these piles were so tall and dusty that they took on a geological air, rising like stalagmites. Jess often felt her workplace was a secret mine or quarry where she could pry crystals from crevices and sweep precious jewels straight off the floor.

As she tended crowded shelves, she opened one volume and then another, turning pages on the history of gardens, perusing Edna St. Vincent Millay: We were very tired, we were very merry, / We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry … dipping into Gibbon: The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay … and old translations of Grimm’s Fairy Tales: They walked the whole day over meadows, fields, and stony places. And when it rained, the little sister said, “Heaven and our hearts are weeping together….”?

During her first days at Yorick’s, the bell had startled Jess when a customer arrived, and she’d been reluctant to stop reading. Then the shop owner, George Friedman, had reminded Jess that he paid her to help others, not simply to help herself to books. He didn’t have to tell Jess twice. Now she engaged every customer she had the pleasure to meet. She greeted and advised, volunteering opinions literary, philosophical, or poetic. George rued the day.

Jess had a look about her—an unsettling blend of innocence and pedantry. She fixed her gray-green eyes upon the customers and said, “You like Henry James? Really?” as if she couldn’t quite believe it. Or she’d warn the purchaser of a multivolume history of domestic life in Victorian England, “You know, this is a history of women’s work based almost exclusively on male sources.”

“It’s a free country,” George called out from the back room. Or sometimes, sotto voce, behind the counter, “Just ring up the damn books.”