One of the pleasures of the Caffé Buongiorno (where for several years I have “measured out my life” with coffee breaks) comes from its situation: directly across Richards Street from Macleod’s Books, the best antiquarian bookstore in town. The proprietor and I often coincide at coffee time, and every now and then our conversation causes him to leap up from the table to catch the traffic light, returning with some fascinating object from his hoard. Once it was a sextant dating from the China trade, boxed and slightly verdigrised, and engraved with its maker’s name along the lower arc; another time a captain’s log showing entries for a voyage made in 1863; “show and tell” on steroids.

Which is how, the other day, I came to sip my cappuccino in the company of T. S. Eliot himself. I should clarify; that which sat upon the far side of my saucer was part of Eliot’s paper corpus rather than his fleshly one: a first edition of his Essays Ancient and Modern (1936). It had evidently suffered the indignities of many yard-, garage- and jumble-sales, had at some point in the past 70 years escaped its stuffy dustjacket to get down and dusty with a lower class of reader; but the title page bore the faded signature of Mr. Eliot himself.

As I leafed through the book I was concious of his ghostly presence, amazed to think that the hands which had penned the “Four Quartets” had also held this very book. Eliot lived to the age of 76 and I expect that his signature is not all that rare, but since this was the first time that I’d seen it for myself, the book had an aura it would not otherwise have had. It’s odd how much power a signature, a simple proof of presence, can have.

“Surely,” I thought “there will come a day when literary scholars and historians will be on my trail as well. Unofficial biographers ransacking dusty shelves, visiting my haunts. Just think how much it would mean to them—to someone not yet born, perhaps!—to find concrete evidence that Eliot and I had once been the best of friends.”

And so, while Macleod’s proprietor tended to our tab, I hastily penned “To Mike, with all admiration and respect” above Tom’s name and headed back to work.