when a Strand Book Store employee, I often packed up books sold to us, usually from people who were moving out of NYC, or from the relatives of someone deceased, loaded them in a van, and brought them to the store.

a common pick up was “a bachelor professor, like at Columbia, apartment in Brooklyn Heights, ground floor of a brownstone”- stacks of books to the ceiling; from the front door a narrow path winding through three rooms of solid books connecting a bed, a bathroom, a delapidated kitchen, a back door revealing a small wildly overgrown garden of sorts. pack the books, load the books. I found two hundred dollars in one of them once- ten brand new twenties, crisp, obtained from the bank and put in the book for safe keeping in 1953. the year they were printed, the year I was born.