Luc Sante on A.J. Liebling
"As his friend Joseph Mitchell noted at the funeral, the secondhand booksellers who were then clustered together in a district on Fourth Avenue held his books in special esteem, because they were in perpetual demand. 'Literary critics don't know which books will last,' Mitchell quoted a bookseller as saying, 'and literary historians don't know. We are the ones who know. We know which books can be read only once, if that, and we know the ones that can be read and reread and reread.' "