“Why are you throwing out Dickens?” I’d asked Lorraine last year at the library book sale, brandishing a copy of Bleak House at her. “You can’t throw out Dickens.”

“Nobody checked it out,” she’d said. “If no one checks a book out for a year, it gets taken off the shelves.” She had been wearing a sweatshirt that said A TEDDY BEAR IS FOREVER, and a pair of plush teddy bear earrings. “Obviously nobody read it.”

“And nobody ever will because it won’t be there for them to check out,” I’d said. “Bleak House is a wonderful book.”

“Then this is your chance to buy it,” she’d said.

Well, and this was a trend like any other, and as a sociologist I should note it with interest and try to determine its origins. I didn’t. Instead, I started checking out books. All my favorites, which I’d never checked out because I had copies at home, and all the classics, and everything with an old cloth binding that somebody might want to read someday when the current trends of sentimentality and schlock are over.

Today I checked out The Wrong Box, in honor of the day’s events, and since I’d first seen Dr. O’Reilly with his legs sticking out from under a large object, The Wizard of Oz, and then went over to the Bs to look for Bennett. The Old Wives’ Tale wasn’t there (it had probably ended up in the book sale already), but right next to Beckett was Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, which meant The Old Wives’ Tale might just be misshelved.

I started down the shelves, looking for something chubby, clothbound, and untouched. Borges; Wuthering Heights, which I had already checked out this year; Rupert Brooke. And Robert Browning. The Complete Works. It wasn’t Arnold Bennett, but it was both clothbound and fat, and it still had an old-fashioned pocket and checkout card in it. I grabbed it and the Borges and took them to the checkout desk.