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Old books that we have known but not possessed cross our path and invite themselves over. New books try to seduce us daily with tempting titles and tantalizing covers. Families beg to be united: volume XVIII of the Complete Works of Lope de Vega is announced in a catalogue, calling to the other seventeen that sit, barely leafed through, on my shelf. How fortunate for Captain Nemo to be able to say, during his twenty-thousand-league journey under the sea, that 'the world ended for me the day when my Nautilus sank underwater for the first time. On that day I bought my last volumes, my last pamphlets, my last periodicals, and since then, it is for me as if humanity no longer thought nor wrote a single word.' But for readers like myself, there are no 'last' purchases this side of the grave.