When Melville died in New York City in 1891, many of his contemporaries were surprised to see his obituary—they thought he had died long before. After the Civil War and the commercial and critical failure of Moby-Dick, Melville stopped writing for publication. Of his seventy-two years, Delbanco notes, only twelve were devoted to writing prose that was published in his lifetime.

Melville was born in 1819 in a newborn nation. Giants such as Adams and Jefferson were still alive, the nation’s economy was mainly agrarian, and slavery flourished. “During Melville’s childhood,” Delbanco writes, “the rhythm of American life was closer to medieval than to modern, but by the time he grew old, he was living in a world that was recognizably our own.” American literature, as embodied by Hawthorne and Emerson, was also coming into its own during Melville’s adolescence.

Melville spent only three years on the high seas—one year sailing to London and back, and another two in the South Pacific and Hawaii. These voyages provided the content of his earliest and most successful books, Typee and Omoo. He planned to make a comfortable living as a professional writer, married, and moved between Arrowhead, his family estate in western Massachusetts, and the bursting metropolis of New York City.

Delbanco believes New York City played a larger role in Melville’s life than many critics have acknowledged. “I have swam through libraries,” Melville wrote, absorbing the works of great European authors in the city’s private and society libraries. His middle-period novels—Mardi, White-Jacket and Redburn—reflected these influences and showed maturity, tackling social, political, and philosophical issues. Most of his characters were drawn from urban landscapes, not from his maritime experiences. Melville once observed, “Where does any novelist pick up any character? For the most part, in town…. Every great town is a kind of man-show, where the novelist goes for his stock.”

Everything was a prelude to the book he began writing in 1850, “a strange sort of book” about a whaling voyage. Delbanco makes a convincing argument that Moby-Dick was the first modern American novel: “a young man’s coming-of-age story, an encyclopedic inventory of facts and myths about whales, a concatenation of romance, philosophy, natural history…. It was also an audacious attempt, long before Freud and his modernist followers, to represent in words the unconscious as well as the conscious processes of the human mind itself.”

“And what of the man at the helm?” Delbanco asks. Ahab is one of the most original characters in the history of literature. He is the first appearance in literature of the modern demagogue, “a prophetic mirror in which every generation of new readers has seen reflected the political demagogues of its own times.”

Melville’s achievement came as his reputation plummeted. The books from his middle period sold poorly. Readers wanted the light-hearted adventure of the South Pacific found in his earlier works, not allegorical epics about whale hunting. Many unsold copies of the first U.S. edition of Moby-Dick were remaindered and then lost to a fire in the publisher’s warehouse. Melville resorted to magazine writing, living off the largesse of his in-laws, and working as a New York customs house inspector for the last decades of his life

His personal life spiraled downward, along with his writing career. He was moody in temperament, capable of enthusiasm and energy, but prone to sudden downswings and withdrawals. These outbursts alienated his wife and four children, especially his sons. Melville would suffer the ghastly fate of outliving both his boys: Malcolm, who committed suicide at eighteen; and Stanwix, who died in poverty at thirty-five.

In this dark period, Melville achieved artistic triumph. He published two of the greatest short stories in the English language. “Bartleby the Scrivener,” Delbanco believes, anticipates Kafka and existentialist literature by decades, grappling with an un-resolvable tension between “the moral truth that we owe our fellow human beings our faith and love” and “the psychological and social truth that sympathy and benevolence have their limits.” In his 1855 novella Benito Cereno, Melville explores race and slavery by inverting the relationship between a Spanish slave-ship captain and his African cargo.

Melville also wrote one last tale, left unfinished and orphaned when he died. Discovered in a tin breadbox, Billy Budd, Sailor was published in 1924, three decades after Melville’s death. Twentieth-century writers such as E. M. Forster, Albert Camus, and Thomas Mann regarded Billy Budd as Melville’s masterwork, one of the most beautiful stories ever written. Generations of readers have been touched by the doom of the Christ-like Billy, but for Melville, Billy’s death is the inevitable consequence of the conflict between society’s laws and natural justice, between the individual and society.

Delbanco’s writing is blessedly free from academic theory, and Melville is good biography and great literary history.

Those obsessed with mongo often live on the margins, sometimes by choice, sometimes by misfortune. The “canner” who collects aluminum cans and glass bottles out of others’ garbage bins for recycling, says Botha, is looking for mongo, as is the old woman driving around the city, examining discarded and often broken furniture on the sidewalk. They may be unemployed, addicts, or psychologically disturbed; or they may be quiet citizens from the suburbs, enthralled by the quest.

Botha classifies mongo collectors into different types. “Pack rats” scour and accumulate for accumulation’s sake. “Survivalists” look for high-quality mongo, like used bed sheets rejected by wealthy Long Island households that can be resold at the flea markets and sidewalk sales of Manhattan. “Anarchists” live off the excess of restaurants and groceries, scavenging food from cartons and garbage bins. They’re usually younger people who are involved in anticonsumer and antiglobalization movements and subsist in the precious few low-rent spaces left in Manhattan. “Visionaries” assemble street-found mongo into ingenious works of art and interior décor that belies their trashy origins.

Most book collectors have seen the eccentric and disheveled devotees of mongo who lurk at the edge of the book trade and salvage treasures, which end up on the shelves of more respectable dealers and in private and institutional libraries. Botha’s chapter “The Dealer” profiles Steven, a street bookseller whose stock consists of discarded books and magazines found among the garbage of museums, luxury apartment buildings, estate sales, and failed stores. He makes remarkable finds and lives by a code of rules that exemplifies guerilla bookselling, such as “Good books can turn up where you least expect them” and “Time spent looking for the right buyer could be worth a lot of money.” Some of these rules also reflect the hard life of mongo collectors existing on the edge of society: “Never get too attached to a book, or for that matter, to anything” and “Most people think that if you collect off the sidewalk, you’re a bum.”

There are profound characters here, and Botha is sympathetic to many of his subjects, but he doesn’t dig deep. An admitted mongo aficionado, he’s more interested in the uses of mongo—especially for art and interior design—than the stories behind the people who collect it.

Whitman opened for business in 1951 and sometime later took the name of Sylvia Beach’s Paris store, which had played host to a bevy of now-famous writers between the world wars. For fifty years he has hosted authors and artists (offering them a bowl of soup and a place to sleep), promoted promising careers, and instigated various causes liberal and profane. The list of writers who visited and hung out at Shakespeare & Co. is a Who’s Who of twentieth century literary history: Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Richard Wright, the Beat writers, the Paris Review crowd, and Samuel Beckett, among others. Whitman says he and Beckett mostly sat and stared at each other.

Mercer worked in Shakespeare & Co. for nearly a year, becoming enmeshed in the egos and eccentricities of this bohemian community, which harkens back to an earlier age of bookselling. “Dude, Shakespeare and Company doesn’t even have a telephone,” his colleagues inform him. “Of course we don’t take credit cards.”

The book’s strength is its two main characters, the store and its owner, and the book is best when it stays inside the shop. Whitman’s motto is “Take what you need, and give what you can.” His aesthetic sense is uncanny, his business sense scatterbrained. After losing a stash of two hundred francs to a nest of hungry rodents, he muses, “At least it’s not the books.” Is Shakespeare & Co. really a business, Mercer wonders, and Whitman replies, “I run a socialist Utopia that masquerades as a bookstore.”