PITTSBURGH — Some love nothing more than quietly browsing in a bookshop. Not me: I browse loudly. Especially in secondhand stores. If I find a comely edition of an old favorite, or an intriguing title by an author I don’t know, I look up for someone, usually the owner or clerk, to kibbitz with.

All too often, I fail. Used bookstores, in particular, seem to be staffed by those who disdain my lowbrow tastes or resent talking to customers.

Then there’s Eric Ackland, the owner of Amazing Books & Records in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood. He seems to have read or listened to everything in his shop, from Isaac Asimov to Michael Connelly to that small-press biography of a dead Hasidic master. He’ll gladly neglect the endless task of computerizing his shelf-busting inventory to talk with you about his beloved 19th-century authors like George Eliot and Dostoyevsky, or his fine selection of Jewish theology. On his way to becoming an Orthodox Jew in his 30s, Ackland briefly took an interest in Christian apologetics, and one day last winter we talked G.K. Chesterton as the store’s hi-fi piped early Pat Benatar.