My father owns about 20,000 books. They line virtually every wall in my parents’ house and fill library-style stacks in the basement, often two rows deep or piled horizontally on the shelves for greater efficiency. There are university press books without dustcovers, paperback classics, coffee-table art books, and many leather-bound volumes, some 450 years old. As a child, I often went along while Dad browsed and shopped. Thus I remember …

A grimy stretch of Farringdon Road in the City of London, between the headquarters of the then-Communist Daily Star and some open Underground lines. As the last vestige of a Saturday-morning book market, there were five or six “barrows” (the wooden carts used for selling produce) filled with books. George Jeffries, the last of the Farringdon Road wholesalers, would buy his stock during the previous week at estate sales. His goal was to get rid of books as quickly as possible, to avoid storage costs. Each barrow was covered with a mound of books under a canvass. Shop owners and a few hardy collectors would surround the pile, jostling for position. George would pull the canvass off and they would tear through the tattered paperbacks, magazines, instructional manuals, catalogs, and old Latin volumes. They would rush their prizes to the wall along the rail lines, where each shopper?s pile was off-limits to his rivals, and then elbow their way back to the main action. Meanwhile, I would sit on my Dad?s pile reading Enid Blyton books, or stroll up and down along the wall daydreaming about adventures of my own, or browse through magazines and children?s books that I had found on the barrows once the grim professionals had moved on.

George was himself a Communist with wild hair and terrible teeth who vacationed on the Soviet Black Sea, yet he was a ruthless entrepreneur. And apparently a chauvinist: he took his sons to the Crimean beaches, but not his wife and daughter. Among his regular customers was a lady who wore a motorcycle helmet into the scrimmage around the barrows. But I also remember …

The last of the Fourth Avenue used bookstores in New York, of which the Strand is the monopolistic survivor. Once there were many little stores, jammed with paperbacks and battered hardcovers, lit with bare electric bulbs, enlivened by jazz l.p.’s, and frequented by graduate students, professors, and seedy independent intellectuals who might argue in loud New York accents. Again, I’d sit on stacks of books, reading Hardy Boys mysteries or Landmark biographies of Thomas Edison or Geronimo. And in those same years, I remember …

Lilies, near Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire: a rambling old mansion in a substantial park. Its parlors with overstuffed chintz furniture, its creaky attic hallways–all were lined with books for sale. Dad and I would walk from Aylesbury along the side of the highway. He would work his way from room to room while I read Gerald Durrell or Roald Dahl or walked through the woods. Tea would be served in the late afternoon, usually to three or four customers. There was supposed to be a ghost, but he waited until after closing time to haunt. And then I remember …

Book-filled barns in upstate New York, with cats and maybe chickens, NPR in the background, and country smells competing with the books’ must … the antiquarian books of Paris, each wrapped in translucent paper, sold from wooden boxes that were locked to the embankment walls of the Seine … half-timbered houses in quaint English country towns with bookshelves nailed to every available space, even under the winding staircases … Second Story’s warehouse in suburban Rockville, MD, where books were once priced at $1 per full cardboard box … Bryn Mawr alumnae bookshops in several American cities, staffed by tweedy volunteers from the class of ’55 … and sweaty high school gyms with books on the tables at 25 cents each.