The Bookshop

Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991).

Anachronistic hotels (pp. 283, 430) are appropriate meeting places for time travelers and a high quality second hand bookshop (pp. 178-179) in San Francisco is an appropriate front for the Time Patrol. Timecycles can materialize unobserved downstairs and agents can arrange to meet in Nick the proprietor's book-cluttered office. Nick, a small, solemn man with thick glasses, sounds stereotypical.

"Nick was a genuine bibliophile; perhaps his main reason for serving the Patrol in this small but vital capacity was the ability he gained to go questing in other milieus. Some recent acquisitions, Victorian to judge by their appearance..." (p. 179)

But does Nick acquire books in earlier periods to sell them now? Surely not. How would he explain a book that was published a hundred years ago but that still looked new? Presumably, the shop handles genuinely old books but Nick, as a perk of Patrol membership, is able to acquire for his private perusal such books when they were still new. However, this paragraph as I reread it does imply that the recent acquisitions were found in the Victorian milieu and that they might be sold to a collector if Nick does not keep them himself.

Nick just makes it into continuing character status because it is he who has phoned Everard to offer him a new assignment in "Death And The Knight." We feel that the series should have continued beyond this point.