This morning I packed up two books to send off to their new owners. Sometimes the combination of book title and buyer fascinates me, and that was the case with one of these books: Nicolas Pevsner's The Englishness of English Art went to a woman named Faith Stewart-Gordon, English squared to double Scotch. In other cases I find the buyer's location oddly apt—or just odd—in combination with the book: I can imagine why a gentleman living on Bear Wallow Road in Huntly, Virginia might buy Life in an English Country House, but it was a man from Los Angeles who bought my anthology of New York poets, and why would a sociologist at Yale want my old copy of Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel?