On Elderly Ants

Abstract

Many owners of secondhand bookstores In town recognize me on sight and inevitably greet me with smiles whenever I walk in. The smiles are more than just good retail business practice—they know that odds are excellent that when I leave I will take with me a lot of merchandise and leave behind a lot of money. I don't collect things as a rule—not coins, not matchbook covers, and not even insects to speak of—but I do seem to have a compulsive need to own out-of-date, cracked, yellowing books about insects. No matter how long that copy of Entomological Papers from the Yearbook of Agriculture 1903–1911 has sat moldering on the shelf, they know that once I walk in they'll never have to dust it again. No matter how ridiculously overpriced that 1910 edition of D. Everett Lyon's How to Keep Bees for Profit may be, the checkbook will open and the ink will flow. Sometimes in their zeal, these booksellers will show me books about snakes, worms, snails, and other noisome creatures, but to date I have usually managed to contain my impulses, succumbing only if there's a passing reference to anything six-legged contained therein.