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Had Simon Halloran known he would be dead in nine months, he would never had gone to Barrington, Ohio. Granted, it was to catalogue a private collection of books, something which he very much enjoyed doing. But he could also have just taken his meagre savings and traveled to as many of the world’s great libraries as possible before the money ran out and possibly avoided his fate.
He could have seen Trinity College, for example, with its ancient Book of Kells, followed by the Long Room, which was filled with row after row of antiquarian volumes no longer seen in public. Just to walk past the lines of busts of great authors would have filled his soul and kept him enthralled for hours.
After that? What about hopping a ferry to catch a train to London and wandering through the British Library? Then visiting with dealers he knew in the antiquarian book trade, in the city. Men and women he’d only met via letters, phone calls or emails.
That could have led to grabbing a bus or train to Oxford to take in the Radcliffe Camera and, maybe, even a week in the Old Bodleian, where they kept a copy of the Magna Carta as well as Shakespeare’s First Folio and the Jane Austen manuscripts. He knew someone who worked there and they had promised a tour should he ever make it over.
Another possibility was a week at The French National Library (BNF) Richelieu, in Paris, and their collection of nine-thousand comic books. No, graphic novels. He’d heard a couple of the ones he’d designed covers for were contained in the Oval Room, and he would love to have seen them. Felt his pride swell at having finally done something that was recognized as worthwhile.
After that? What about the Strahov Monastery Library in Prague? Not only for its beauty of it but also to peruse some of the old volumes on natural sciences. Or hop down to the library of St. Catherine’s Monastery in Egypt and, hopefully, be allowed to hold one of its ancient manuscripts?
He could even have journeyed to Rio de Janeiro to the Real Gabinete Português de Leitura, despite speaking no language but English. He had packed a private law library in Portugal for transport there, a couple years earlier, and simply wanted to see where they’d wound up.
But Simon was not one to simply jaunt off on a trip to foreign lands. He was the kind of person whom everyone would refer to as careful. A mellow kind of guy. His height was average and he was still rather thin. What hair he had left was shifting from blond to white thanks to being well into his seventies. His features were on the accommodating side, even when he was wearing his readers. His clothing plain and simple, though every shirt had to have a pocket for a pen or pencil, and he would wear nothing but slacks.
On top of it, he did have that vaguely dusty, almost ethereal air about him that came from working in bookstores his entire life, added to by the last twenty-five years of it being with Veriman’s Rare Books and Manuscripts. The owners were the ones who had convinced him to travel to Lisbon to help a very good client with his donation. Meaning pack it well-enough for shipment and handle the paperwork.
Which had necessitated an emergency application for a passport, since Simon had never needed or wanted one, before.
Oh, he was glad he had gone, once he was there and safely ensconced in a hotel in the old city. But it was still a very tense buildup to the journey and he was glad once everything had finally been picked up. Especially since the donor and the transportation company had disagreed about something or other and argued viciously beforehand. All in that language he did not understand. He had been relieved to get home.
Veriman’s was in a rambling old storefront in Afton Springs, New York, on the town’s gentrified Main Street. It was owned by Tomas Viersç and Harold Harman, both of whom were well into their eighties, more round than not, always in trousers held up by suspenders, and wearing cardigans, even in warm weather. They also had minimal hair on their heads. They looked so much alike people thought they were brothers, but one was from Oregon and the other from Shkodër, Albania.
Though they did enjoy bickering like an old married couple.
The Portugal trip had convinced Simon it was time to retire so there would be no chance of that happening, again. He had an apartment in subsidized senior housing on the north end of town, where he happily lived alone. What family he had left was mainly in Texas, and he preferred it. He had been in one relationship with a man named Doyle, and that had been one too many. Now he maintained only friends and acquaintances. Nor was there a pet of any kind; too demanding.
Therefore, he would have had more than time to make his library tour if he’d just allowed himself to do so. What held him back was the bane of us all: money.
He survived well-enough on Social Security and Medicare, and had been able to maintain his savings at a decent level for the last couple years. He was also healthy enough to not need constant medical attention.
But then his two decades old CRV had demanded its brake system be rebuilt, and that had put quite a dent into his safety net. So when he received a call from Olivier Deskin, one of the book dealers in the UK he knew fairly well, asking him to catalogue a collection in Barrington...while he was reticent about making the journey, the fee he was promised quickly overcame his hesitation.
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