One Saturday afternoon in the winter of 2009, after visiting Trinity College Library in Dublin, I bought a notebook in a bookstore off College Green. For several years now, I have been collecting alphabet books, that is, books with letters for titles, and in Dublin I decided to start keeping a record or, if you will, a log of these occasional searches. To begin with, I wrote down bibliographic details and cataloged the travels — either my own travels or the shipping history of the book in question — as well as the expenditures involved in finding and acquiring this or that item, but soon my entries became less rigorous. The notebook has a convenient, expandable inner pocket where I keep receipts, and on the inside cover I’ve penciled the following inscription:

A, B, C, D, Etc.