“That’s what they say,” Mercer replied. “These are beautiful.”

“They are,” he said, still caressing the book. “Sometimes when I’m having a lousy day I sneak down here and lock myself in this room and pull out the books. I try to imagine what it was like being J. D. Salinger in 1951, when this was published, his first novel. He had published a few short stories, a couple in The New Yorker, but he wasn’t well known. Little, Brown printed ten thousand of these at first, and now the book sells a million copies a year, in sixty-five languages. He had no idea what was coming. It made him rich and famous and he couldn’t handle the attention. Most scholars believe he sort of cracked up.”

“I taught it in my class two years ago.”

“So you know it well?”

“It’s not my favorite. Again, I prefer female writers, preferably those still alive.”

“And you would like to see the rarest book I have by a woman, dead or alive, right?”

“Sure.”

He returned to the safe, with Mercer filming every step and even moving away slightly for another clear frontal assault with her little camera. He found his book and returned to the table. “How about Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own?” He opened the clamshell and removed the book. “Published in 1929. First edition, near-fine copy. I found it twelve years ago.”

“I love this book. I read it in high school and it inspired me to become a writer, or at least give it a shot.”

“It’s quite rare.”

“I’ll give you ten thousand for it.”

They shared a laugh and he politely said, “Sorry. It’s not for sale.” He handed it to her. She gently opened it and said, “She was so brave. Her famous line is ‘A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.’ ”

“She was a tortured soul.”

“I’ll say. She killed herself. Why do writers suffer so much, Bruce?” She closed the book and handed it back to him. “So much destructive behavior, even suicide.”

“I can’t understand the suicide, but I sort of get the drinking and bad habits. Our friend Andy tried to explain it years ago. He said it’s because the writing life is so undisciplined. There’s no boss, no supervisor, no time clock to punch or hours to keep. Write in the morning, write at night. Drink when you want to. Andy thinks he writes better with a hangover, but I’m not sure about that.” Bruce was fitting the books back into their clamshells. He returned them to the safe.

Impulsively, she asked, “What’s in the drawers?”

Without the slightest hesitation, he replied, “Old manuscripts, but they’re not worth a lot, not when compared to these books. John D. MacDonald is a favorite of mine, especially his Travis McGee series, and a few years ago I was able to buy two of his original manuscripts from another collector.” He was closing the door as he said this. Obviously, the drawers were off-limits.