All Souls by Javier Marías

apparently complete, were in fact expurgated of everything considered at the time (or by Lady Burton) to be obscene. The hunter of books is condemned to specialise in subjects related to his main prey, which he tracks down with the greatest eagerness, and at the same time, as he becomes infected with the unstoppable collecting bug, he grows irremediably and increasingly more generous and accommodating in his enthusiasms. That's certainly what happened to me and, seeing my interests grow ever wider and more disparate, I decided to restrict the prime objective of my systematic searches to just five or six authors, and my choice of those authors was based as much on the difficulty of finding them as on any actual desire to read or possess their books. They were minor authors, who were all in some way odd, ill-fated, forgotten or unappreciated, known only to the few and not even commonly reprinted in their country of origin; the most famous (but much more famous in my country than in his own) and the least minor of them was the Welshman Arthur Machen, that fine stylist and strange narrator of subtle horrors, who, in a survey carried out during the Spanish Civil War amongst fifty British men of letters, was the only one publicly to declare his preference for Franco's side, perhaps merely as an affirmation of his affinity with purest terror. Despite his reputation, his books are not easy to find in English, particularly in the old editions greatly prized by collectors, and when I saw the difficulty I was having finding many of the titles I lacked, I contacted several booksellers and asked them to put by any that came their way and even to seek them out for me.
    In England second-hand booksellers still travel round the country visiting ancient bookshops in obscure towns and remote villages, turning up at country houses owned by the illiterate descendants of some late but lettered man, snapping up bargainsat shabby local auctions, never missing even a makeshift or spur-of-the-moment provincial book sale (often held in such places as the local fire station, the foyer of a hotel with no guests, or a church cloister). Since their lives are an endless round of travelling, researching and hunting things down it makes sense to tell them what you're looking for, because the chances are they can find it for you. Amongst the booksellers whose acquaintance I cultivated was a married couple by the name of Alabaster, who made a major contribution to my stock of eccentric acquisitions. Their shop was small, dark and comfortable, simple and insalubrious, a cross between a cosy nook and a haunted house, with beautiful fine wood shelves all of them warped and barely visible beneath the weight and inconceivable disorder of the thousands of books that did not so much fill the shelves as crush and bury them. The Alabasters must have made a reasonable living for inside that dark, stuffy, dusty place, lit even at the brightest hours of the day by a couple of lamps with glass shades, was the additional glow of a television screen which, in the closest of closed circuits, allowed them to see what was going on beneath the one flickering bulb of the shop's basement without their having to keep going up and down the stairs every time a prospective buyer ventured down there to explore its depths. As if wishing to participate in a modernity with which their merchandise was so at odds, the couple seemed to spend their days watching on television (in black and white) what could be seen only a few yards away, right under their noses (in colour). Mrs Alabaster was a smiling, authoritarian woman, with one of those very English smiles that you see adorning the faces of famous stranglers in films as they're about to choose their next victim. She was middle-aged with greying hair, fierce eyes and capped teeth and, wrapped in a pink woollen shawl, she would sit at her desk, writing incessantly in an enormous accounts book. To judge by her constant activity, which she