Indeed, chance was queen and happenstance the king, for I found #65 (a work which had eluded me) quite by luck on top of a pile of trash in the alley behind The Rainbow Art Glass Shop where I sometimes scrounged for chartreuse, scarlet., or raisin-colored shards through which I could perceive a transformed world. #65 needn’t have been O. Henry; it might have been a mystery just as well, or someone’s autobiography, or a kids classic like Pinocchio. I read them all, in any case; it was my morality. If, in the set which was filling my shelves, #20 was missing, I’d look up the title in the list they printed in the back of every book, and speculate about The Return of the Native, or shiver with anticipation at owning, someday, a copy of The Bowstring Murders.

My appetite was innocent and indiscriminate. I went from The Story of Mankind to The Corpse with the Floating Foot with scarcely a blink or hiccup. Imaginary murders amused me as much as actual ones. The past was as fictional as the future. For writers like Van Loon or readers my age, mankind had a history because its history told a story; there was an incipient “working out” in all things human which encouraged the hope of a happy resolution, even if it was only discovering the guilty, which G & I is devoted to doing, just like Charlie Chan or the other sleuths in those paper-covered books. Certainly I could not understand, then, how completely the world survived as the word, or that it was the historian’s duty to outshout Time and talk down Oblivion. Nor could I know that the last little existence my Malt Shop might have (or this spindle-like rack with its beckoning books, my stupidly named and simple streets, those shining tins of imported oil, their golden roses and musical medallions) would consist of a few foolish sentences, these random jottings, a small sheaf of loose pages carefully concealed from any likely reader.