Libby and I spent our first hours together shelving board books and pop-up books and organizing the spinner racks with copies of “The Berenstain Bears” and “The Poky Little Puppy.” Between customers we talked.

She wore a vintage sweater and hippie earrings and had the posture of a heron. I was 24, a chain-smoker, and had just moved back to Denver after trying out life in distant places. The pay at the bookstore was dismal, but everything else about the place was transcendent. Including Libby.

A dancer from New Hampshire, she made found-art collages using old books and scraps of rusty metal, layers of Gesso and paint. She told me about herself, but it wasn’t until my first visit to her apartment, when she slid book after book about art and artists from her shelves and set them in my lap, that I really began to understand her: Kurt Schwitters, Andy Goldsworthy, Russian Paper Art. They told me almost everything.

In my apartment I returned the favor, handing over books of snake handlers, Irish poets, collections of saints. Within weeks we were dating.