Merlin Grainger was employed by the Moonlight Quill¹ Bookshop, which you may have visited, just around the corner from the Ritz-Carlton on Forty-seventh Street. The Moonlight Quill is, or rather was, a very romantic little store, considered radical³ and admitted dark. It was spotted⁴ interiorly with red and orange posters of breathless exotic intent, and lit no less by the shiny reflecting bindings of special editions than by the great squat⁶ lamp of crimson⁷ satin that, lighted through all the day, swung overhead. It was truly a mellow⁸ bookshop. The words “Moonlight Quill” were worked over the door in a sort of serpentine⁹ embroidery¹⁰. The windows seemed always full of something that had passed the literary censors¹² with little to spare; volumes with covers of deep orange which offer their titles on little white paper squares. And over all there was the smell of the musk¹³, which the clever, inscrutable Mr. Moonlight Quill ordered to be sprinkled about-the smell half of a curiosity shop in Dickens’ London and half of a coffee-house on the warm shores of the Bosphorus.

From nine until five-thirty Merlin Grainger asked bored old ladies in black and young men with dark circles under their eyes if they “cared for this fellow” or were interested in first editions. Did they buy novels with Arabs on the cover, or books which gave Shakespeare’s newest sonnets¹⁴ as

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