There’s nothing worse than knocking over a pile of books in a bookshop. Nowhere in the world could be more silent, or more comfortable. I like the silence. It gives me time to think, to examine the great shelves of memories and fictions, all covered in a thick dust that attests their age.

So when someone knocks over a pile of books, and they clatter all over the floor, flapping pages this way and that and knocking their hard spines together, it’s painful.

I never even saw it coming! I’d stooped to pick up a book and as I did so my cane knocked the stack right over. In the silence that followed the dust sprang up into my face and soon I fell into a hopeless coughing fit as the kids in the next aisle began to laugh hysterically and the old git that owns the place, only a little younger than myself, began muttering under his breath.

Most of the books were well over thirty years old and worth little, but I focused hard on tidying them as if they were gold. I knew the shop owner was watching me; just waiting for his chance to wander over and make sure everything was put back in its correct place.

I tried to ignore the kids and was glad I didn’t have any of my own. I was sure they didn’t care about books and were only hiding from the rain. Kids these days can’t read. Don’t have any appreciation for literature. Or art. Or old people.

I placed the last book on the top of the pile and stopped to look at it. It was Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, a book I’d always wanted to read. I wasn’t a big fan of that kind of nonsense normally, but the idea of these extinct creatures still existing out of sight of the world intrigued me.

I sideways-glanced at the shop owner, checked that he was once again engrossed in his crossword, and lifted the book closer to my face.

It smelt musky, like it had sat within this pile of books for so long that the ceaseless rising and falling of the Sun had burnt its pages to a thin, crisp, bundle of sheets.

With the kids down one aisle and the shop owner by the door, I decided to retreat to the furthest corner and sat down to read. I never got to the opening sentence. Scribbled in the top right-hand corner of the inside page, in terrible handwriting, was a name and address. Both seemed so familiar to me that my heart seemed almost to ache, though I couldn’t for the life of me remember having ever seen them before.