Read The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons (Bernie Rhodenbarr) for Free Online Page A

he’s gonna feel like showing up at grandma’s house every day?”
    “Well, I haven’t met the kid,” I said. “Maybe he’s convinced he’s the next generation’s Jeff Bezos, ready to launch his own version of Amazon. But maybe not, and when the novelty wears off he may lose his taste for online enterprise.”
    “And she’ll still have a house full of books, so she’ll pick up the phone and give you a call.”
    I shook my head. “She’ll pick up the phone,” I agreed, “but she’ll call somebody else. She’ll feel too embarrassed to call me, and she’ll tell herself she already bothered that nice Mr. Rhodenbarr enough. And that’ll be that.”

    So I finished lunch and walked two doors west and opened up again, dragging my bargain table out to the street even as I wondered why I bothered. For that matter, why move the table inside when I closed for lunch? Why not leave it out there on the sidewalk? Anybody who stole a book would be doing me a favor.
    Within the hour the man who called himself Mr. Smith showed up to make me an offer I could have refused. But why would I want to?

 

    “This book,” he said.
    I’d seen him come in, watched him find his way to Classic Fiction, then turned my attention to Jeffery Deaver, whose latest Lincoln Rhyme novel had turned up in a carton of recent thrillers. The paraplegic hero had just solved everything and saved everybody, but I was still forty-plus pages from the end. So I was bracing myself for the author’s trademark switcheroo, in which one of the good guys would turn out to be the ultimate bad guy. A thoroughly charming character would meet a horrible end, and there’d be a bad moment when I thought Amelia Sachs was dead, but it would turn out that Rhyme was one step ahead of the killer all along, and everything would work out well, and in plenty of time for the next book in the series.
    So I knew what was coming, and I knew too that Deaver would manage to surprise me. So the last thing I wanted now was to have my reading interrupted, and yet at the same time I welcomed the interruption, because that way the book would last longer.
    Oh, never mind.
    “Fitzgerald’s second collection of short fiction,” I said. “ Tales of the Jazz Age , Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922. A very nice copy, marred only by the signature on the flyleaf of the book’s erstwhile owner.”
    He looked, and read out the name: “Wilma Faulk.”
    “Had it been William Faulkner,” I said, “it would be an association copy, and thus command a premium. A man with a steady hand might find himself tempted. I should point out that it’s a first edition but not the first printing. I meant to include a penciled note to that effect.”
    “You did, just below Miss Faulk’s spidery signature. And you’re quite correct. I checked line six on page 232, and the word in question reads ‘and.’ It appears erroneously as ‘an’ in first printing copies.”
    “You’re a collector.”
    “In a small way.”
    “Then you know how elusive true first printing copies are these days. I’ve seen listings for close to a thousand dollars, and that’s when you can find them.”
    “Actually,” he said, “I own one.”
    “A first printing.”
    “Although I didn’t pay quite that dearly for it.”
    I pointed to the book he was holding. “If it’s the dust jacket that drew you,” I said, “it’s not an original. They’re genuinely impossible to find. This one’s a copy, produced in San Francisco by Mark Terry’s Facsimile Dust Jacket Printshop. The most recent owner, who acquired his copy many years after it left Miss Faulk’s tremulous hands, bought the Terry jacket knowing he could never afford an original. He said it looked just as good on his shelf.”
    “I’m sure it did,” he said, and cleared his throat. “I own an original dust jacket.”
    “You do.”
    “Yes.”
    Well, good for you, I thought, and what are you doing slumming in my store?
    “I have a first of This