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Most of the collectors whose libraries we bought were dead years before the libraries came to us, so the only way we could judge the level of eccentricity in the collectors was the books themselves, or from other evidence. …

An Orientalist named Paul Linebarger, whose father, we were told, had been Sun Yat-sen’s lawyer, had absolutely wonderful books, but he had other things, too. He was an early expert on psychological warfare, which I believe he later taught. In one of his closets, for example, we found a huge pile of anticommunist comic books in Mongolian. Paul Linebarger also wrote science fiction, under the name Cordwainer Smith. And he had an interest in ladies’ lingerie. One of the more unusual things we bought from his estate was a bra mannequin, complete with bra. Several drawers full of bras we let lie.

I realize that most of you have probably never heard of Smith, but that’s okay. We won’t shy away from celebrating the unjustly obscure here. Scanners need no longer live in vain.

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