In the first year after Copper Creek’s publication, Eric Osborne could not enter a bookstore without looking for it. Spotting its handsome sepia-toned cover among the primary-colored jumble and clutter of other titles was like spotting a fellow fan of your college’s basketball team in some faraway locale. Or it was like seeing a long-lost family member who shared a feature you were glad to have inherited, the same straight nose or square jawline or enviable height. He looked forward to that moment of recognition and even, in a way that he could not explain, felt that it was mutual, felt that the book recognized him. Because he liked to shop for few things other than books, Eric experienced these moments often, both in large, impersonal chain bookstores and small, charming independent ones; for a short time, when he was traveling long distances to read to tiny audiences, he even had them in airport bookstores, with their rotating kiosks of neck pillows and clip-on book lights, their gilded bookmarks and pillow-sized bags of trail mix. Sometimes he’d find copies in a promising stack among the front tables, but more often, especially as that first year approached its end, he’d find a single copy of Copper Creek shelved alone, along with more successful writers’ paperbacks: between Vladimir Nabokov and Cynthia Ozick, or, in less literary bookstores, in the airport ones staffed by neck-tattooed teens with little concept of alphabetical order, between Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne. For a while Eric would quietly remove the book from its rightful or wrongful home and reshelve it on a “staff favorites” table, or even with the “coming soon to a theater near you” titles. He felt like it was his duty to the book, and even to the publishers, with whom he was still on good and familiar terms. It felt like introducing a shy but very worthy and witty friend around at a party: how could you not?