Two Paperbacks

A friend of mine once cleared a bookshelf with one sentence. It took him a week to collect. I have spent twenty years understanding that afternoon, and the understanding became a book. Let me tell you the story first. The store was a Mormon bookstore, an independent, living on the trade of the wards around it. My friend belonged to that trade twice over, as a customer and as a lay officer of the church the store served. He worked in technology all week, and on Sundays he presided over a congregation. He was the bishop of his ward. That is an unpaid office, and a heavy one, and it mattered that day, because of the name it let him borrow. Understand what that borrowing did, because the whole book lives inside it. On his own name, my friend had an opinion about children's paperbacks, and the owner would have heard an opinion and sold the next copy.