I would return over the slow roll of the hill about as rapidly as the shade did, prolonging my liberty and my pleasure. About halfway home there was a drugstore which kept a stock of Pocket Books in a round wire rack, and I would spend my final twenty-five cents on Lost Horizon, which had been published as #1 and therefore honored above the rest, or on a heavy red-edged tome like An Outline of History, thick as a steak, or on The Story of Mankind, one of the earliest. These glistening little books stole the breath. Their covers were made from a kind of cellophane which had been bonded to the cardboard, and this created a surface so protective you could safely set down on it a sweating glass, although the dye they’d used to stain the edges of the pages would redden a warm palm; and in time, too, the cellophane would loosen and be sloughed off like old skin. Still, the type was crisp and sprightly, the paper didn’t yellow, the backs cracked only occasionally, the print of the previous page left a pleasant afterimage the way the chocolate lingered in my mouth, and the books could be collected like baseball cards or bottle caps or stamps. I desired a full set in the worst way, and I fed my quarters into the series as though it were a slot; but, of course, the enterprise expanded quickly from its first ten toward its first hundred, so finally I had to call a halt (at #92, The Pocket Bible, I remember), and with that decision I lost all hunger for completeness despite the fact I still had gaps (The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, for instance). At least wouldn’t have to purchase #107, The Pocket Book of Etiquette, which had been announced. The cost of my hobby had also risen with the enlargement of the published line, and required an increasing number of small thefts—loose change from pockets, sugar crocks, and drawers—which I feared were finally being noticed, and suspicious watches set.

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.