52 pick up

There was a short story we read once about a guy who collected playing cards. In fact he was collecting a full deck of cards with the kicker being that he could only add cards that he found randomly on the street. Over the years, one by one, he slowly assembled close to a full deck. An Ace of Spades in a gutter here, a Queen of Clubs blown into a doorway there. Years went past and he had them all, all but one card. The Seven of Diamonds. Then one morning he spotted a flash of red under a park bench, and sure enough it was the last card. He went home, added it to the deck, walked upstairs, and hung himself. Which is to explain why, after years of collecting books about private art collections (one or two a year), we weren’t as pleased as we might have been when we saw a shelve with about 100 of them at the incredible Walther König Books yesterday.