hand on it.
His expression, insofar as the beard showed it, was guarded. He asked me if I bought books, and his voice sounded rusty, as if he didn’t get too many chances to use it.
I allowed that I did, if they were books I thought I could sell. He propped his attaché case on the counter, worked its clasps, and opened it to reveal a single large volume, which he took up and presented to me. Lepidopterae was its title, François Duchardin was its author, and Old World butterflies and moths were its subject matter, discussed exhaustively (I can only presume) in its French text and illustrated spectacularly upon its color plates.
“The frontispiece is missing,” he told me, as I paged through the book. “The other fifty-three plates are intact.”
I nodded, my eyes on a page of swallowtail butterflies. When I was a boy I used to pursue such creatures with a homemade net, killing them in a mason jar, then spreading their wings and pinning them in cigar boxes. I must have had a reason for such curious behavior, but I can’t begin to imagine what it might have been.
“Print dealers break these up,” he said, “but this is such a desirable volume and in such good condition I thought it really ought to go to an antiquarian book dealer.”
I nodded again, this time looking at moths. One was a cecropia. That and the luna are the only moths I know by name. I used to know others.
I closed the book, asked him what he wanted for it.
“A hundred dollars,” he said. “That’s less than two dollars a plate. A print dealer would charge five or ten a plate, and he’d get that easily from decorators.”
“Could be,” I said. I ran my finger over the book’s top edge, where a rectangle enclosed the stamped words New York Public Library. I opened the book again, looking for a Withdrawn stamp. Libraries do divest themselves of books, just as museums deaccession some of their holdings, though Duchardin’s Lepidopterae hardly seemed a candidate for such treatment.
“Those overdue charges can mount up,” I said sympathetically, “but they have these amnesty days now and then when you can return overdue books with no penalty. It seems unfair to those of us who pay our fines without protest, but I suppose it does get books back in circulation, and that’s the important thing, isn’t it?” I closed the book again, set it deliberately into his open attaché case. “I don’t buy library books,” I said.
“Somebody else will.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
“I know one dealer who has his own Withdrawn stamp.”
“I know a carpenter who drives screws with a hammer,” I said. “There are tricks to every trade.”
“This book didn’t even circulate. It sat in a locked case in the reference section, available by special request only, and because of its value they found ways to avoid letting people have access to it. The library’s supposed to serve the public, but they think they’re a museum; they keep their best books away from people.”
“It doesn’t seem to have worked.”
“How’s that?”
“They couldn’t keep this one away from you.”
He grinned suddenly, showing clean if misaligned teeth. “I can get anything out of there,” he said. “Anything.”
“Really.”
“You name a book and I’ll lift it. I’ll tell you, I could bring you one of the stone lions if the price was right.”
“We’re a little crowded around here just now.”
He tapped Lepidopterae. “Sure you can’t use this? I could probably ease up a little on the price.”
“I don’t do much volume in natural history. But that’s beside the point. I honestly don’t buy library books.”
“That’s a shame. It’s the only kind I deal in.”
“A specialist.”
He nodded. “I’d never take anything from a dealer, an independent businessman struggling to make ends meet. And I’d never steal from a collector. But libraries—” He set his shoulders, and a muscle worked in his chest. “I was a graduate student for a long time,” he said. “When I wasn’t asleep I was in a library. Public libraries, university libraries. I spent ten months in London and never got out of the British Museum. I have a special relationship with libraries. A love-hate relationship, I guess you’d call it.”
“I see.”
He closed his attaché case, fastened its clasps. “They’ve got two Gutenberg Bibles in the library of the British Museum. If you ever read that one of them disappeared, you’ll know who got it.”
“Well,” I said, “whatever you do, don’t bring it here.”
A couple of hours later I