He came in maybe every four or five months, always around midday, always looking for the fiction section first before drifting toward whatever we had by a specific mystery writer he liked, and every so often, not every visit but often enough that I eventually noticed the pattern, he’d buy the same battered mass-market paperback of a novel I won’t name here, since this isn’t really his story to have identified. The first time I assumed it was a gift. The second time I wondered if he’d lost his own copy. By the third time, maybe a year and a half into noticing him as a regular, I’d started quietly setting a copy aside whenever one came through in a trade box, the way you’d hold something back for a customer whose taste you’ve started to actually track.

I finally asked, on the fourth purchase, more out of genuine curiosity than any real expectation of an answer, and he told me plainly, no hesitation, that he gave it away each time. Not to the same person. To whoever in his life seemed like they needed it that particular season, a coworker going through something he wouldn’t specify, a nephew starting college, once, he said, a stranger he’d struck up a conversation with on a train who mentioned feeling stuck. He didn’t keep a copy for himself anymore. He said he’d read it enough times that he didn’t need the object, just needed to keep having one on hand to give away when the moment presented itself.

I think about that exchange more than almost any other single conversation I’ve had at the counter in twelve years, mostly because it reframed something I’d been getting slightly wrong about my own relationship to books. I collect. I catalog. I hold onto things, sometimes past the point of any reasonable justification, the drawer of annotated copies I’ve written about here before being the clearest example. His model was the opposite, a single book kept in circulation rather than in a collection, its value measured by how many times it left his hands rather than how carefully he preserved his own copy of it.

I don’t know if I could actually do what he does. I like my shelves too much, and I think that’s a fine way to love books too. But I’ve started, in a smaller way, keeping an extra copy of two or three titles behind the counter now, ready to press into the right customer’s hands at the right moment rather than just sell whatever’s on the shelf. I don’t know if it counts as the same gesture. It feels like a start.