I am in the Book Scout's apartment. The blinds are drawn and the ramps of sunlight that are sneaking around the blinds are loaded with swirling dust motes. There is a game show on the television in the corner, the volume turned down low. Dirty laundry is much in evidence, strewn about, along with rumpled cellophane, plastic silverware, wax fast-food cups stuffed with candy wrappers and cigarette butts, Styrofoam containers, dirty dishes, and ashtrays overflowing with more cigarette butts. An untended cigarette is burning in an empty Vienna-sausage tin on a coffee table piled high with magazines, books, newspapers, and dealer catalogs. And there are books everywhere: arranged in tottering heaps and jammed along the shelves of industrial metal racks lining the walls, with first editions in the several-hundred-dollar range lumped in with well-read paperback Westerns and... More >>>