Harry remembered the story his father had told him, how John had shown up shortly after he’d opened the new store, asking if he could volunteer for a few hours per week, maybe straighten the shelves, or deal with customers. He was a retiree, with time on his hands, and Bill had reluctantly agreed to let him come in for a few hours each week. The next day, John had shown up at opening time, and stayed until Bill sent him home sometime in the afternoon. It continued like that, John learning every facet of the business, until Bill finally insisted on paying him. They haggled and settled on the minimum wage. After that, John was always at the store, always wearing a suit and tie; he’d made himself indispensable.

Harry finished his coffee and went to help stack the new books on one of the two card tables in the store’s back room. There were about thirty of these unopened boxes, all containing books from one estate sale that Bill had purchased sight unseen, making an offer over the phone after hearing that the man who had died had collected hardcover Wodehouse novels. Harry’s father had started book scouting when he was still an undergraduate at Columbia, studying English literature and hoping to become a writer. One of his professors had gotten him into it, sending him upstate to garage and rummage sales the summer before his senior year. He taught him what to look for, and how to negotiate. One of the lessons was to never bicker over single volumes at estate sales. If there was something in the shelves that was worth money, then you would always make a fast offer to buy all the books. The children of the deceased were almost always thrilled and relieved, and you never knew what other gems might appear.

Bill had fallen in love with book scouting—“treasure hunting for the unadventurous,” he called it—and for ten years after college made a meager living at it, sticking to the East Coast, and selling his finds at the then-myriad selection of used bookstores in the city. By the time he was thirty he could barely navigate his single-bedroom Greenwich Village apartment because of the stacks of books he’d accumulated. He got a loan at a bank and opened Ackerson’s Rare Books. His first employee was a shy Barnard College grad named Emily Vetchinsky. They married three months after he hired her, and nine months after that Harry was born.

“Junk, mostly, so far,” John said, slitting open another box and peering at its contents.

“How can you tell?” Harry asked.

“You learn, over time.” He was holding an interesting-looking hardcover edition of Jaws, with a black cover, and the image of a white, stylized shark. He put that one to the side. “Although I double-check myself, take a look at prices on the Web. Your father didn’t need to do that.”