Larry McMurty's 101th chapter begins, 'I've chosen, for the most part, to keep this memoir personality-free. Attempting to interest twenty-first-century readers in the personalities (mainly) twentieth-century bookmen risks making this narrative more circumscribed than I want to be. Who among today's readers, needs to know about booksellers who are, in the Botswanaian term, "late"?'

'So it goes,' Kurt Vonnegut replied.