They came off his shelves at home, from the ten-by-ten storage down on
the lakeshore, they came from friends and enemies who'd borrowed his
books years before and who'd "forgotten" to return them, but Alan
*never* forgot, he kept every book in a great and deep relational
database that had begun as a humble flatfile but which had been imported
into successive generations of industrial-grade database software.
This, in turn, was but a pocket in the Ur-database, The Inventory in
which Alan had input the value, the cost, the salient features, the
unique identifiers, and the photographic record of every single thing he
owned, from the socks in his sock drawer to the pots in his
cupboard. Maintaining The Inventory was serious business, no less
important now than it had been when he had begun it in the course of
securing insurance for the bookshop.
Alan was an insurance man's worst nightmare, a customer from hell who'd
messenger over five bankers' boxes of detailed, cross-referenced
Inventory at the slightest provocation.
The books filled the shelves, row on row, behind the dust-proof,
light-proof glass doors. The books began in the foyer and wrapped around
the living room, covered the wall behind the dining room in the kitchen,
filled the den and the master bedroom and the master bath, climbed the
short walls to the dormer ceilings on the third floor.
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