Inclined Toward Magic

Imagine...

...owning a book printed in 1584 and having a fellow collector declare, sight unseen, that it is a "bastard" copy.

...finding stacks of dusty pamphlets written by the magician Harry Houdini. Decades after their publication in 1924 they are still selling for their original price of one dollar. Then one day in 1990 a copy turns up in an auction gallery in New York and sells for seven hundred dollars.

...negotiating the purchase of a world-class collection of rare books and learning that the owner in England has decided to sell them to a neighbor, who packs the books into the trunk of his car and takes them to his castle. Several years later the collection turns up in Kansas!

These are just three of the fascinating accounts appearing in Inclined Toward Magic: Encounters with Books, Collectors and Conjurors, the second and final volume of book-collecting adventures by David Meyer.

The companion volume, identical in size and format to Memoirs of a Booksnake: Forty Years of Seeking and Saving Old Books, which Larry McMurtry called "a charming, persuasive, and accurate account of what a book scout does."