If the relationship between bookselling and authorship is something of an incestuous one, then we must forgive the antiquarian bookseller for nursing even stranger and more contradictory feelings. All my long years of training amidst musty and sometimes rotting tomes has led me to the understanding that most books fail to sell, and the ones that do sell are probably doomed to be forgotten, and even most of the ones that stand the test of time are simply waiting for the zeitgeist to encounter an unfavorable change in the winds. No, life as an antiquarian bookseller does not leave one with a particularly favorable view of authorship as a career. It doesn't even paint bookselling, or publishing, in a great light, as the literary arc of history invariably veers towards cheerful, unrepentant bankruptcy. A morbid place for an author to start, to be sure, and perhaps why I avoided the idea for as long as I did.