And then, they were gone ...

"We sold them," he said.

"You sold them?" I repeated stupidly.

"Yep. No one was checking them out," he said.

So now they are gone, that whole row of weighty tomes, the Cambridge Ancient History. I have been driving the extra ten miles to this library several times a year for a decade now, checking out each volume in turn, working my way from ancient Mesopotamia to the Augustan Age.

My neighborhood library, as I've mentioned before, is worthless for such things.

The only ones left on the shelf, ironically, are the volumes that I have checked out, probably, as the librarian said, because I had checked them out, proving that some human being actually found those volumes interesting.

Nobody but me ever cared to check them out but when they were put up for sale, some lucky bibliophile snapped them all up, probably for a buck a book -- a steal of gargantuan proportions.

I gave the man my number and he promised to call me if they decide to evict the rest of the collection.