After a while,

Bill must have sensed that I was beginning to feel overwhelmed by his offerings—there was so much to discover, to learn, and so many pages to turn! With what I later realized was his typical graciousness, Bill turned to a couple of low shelves near a corner. These were vintage cookbooks, he explained, another passion of his. He pulled out Spécialités de la Maison and encouraged me to look through it, saying something like: “You’re French—you’ll appreciate this. It’s really quite a fun book: All kinds of great people from the ’40s are in there, and all to help France during the war.”