The Bronx is both a working landscape for Apollo Kagwa’s rare-book business and the setting for two sharply different estate-sale expeditions. In the South Bronx, a crowded basement yields a cache of occult books; later, in Riverdale, a quiet residential street becomes the destination for a tense drive with his infant son. The borough’s changing environments make each search a different test of Apollo’s calling and responsibilities.

A landscape of book hunts

Apollo’s work takes him to estate sales whose promise ranges from a garbage bag of water-damaged books to shelves of pristine first editions. The Bronx becomes the setting for two of his consequential searches: an early visit to a basement collection left by the D’Agostinos, and a later trip to a house in Riverdale after Patrice Green alerts him to another sale. The contrast between these destinations shows the range concealed within a single borough, from a basement filled with containers to a suburban-feeling street lined with homes on grassy plots.

The South Bronx collection

At the first sale, Apollo finds forty-two containers of books in the basement of a Bronx apartment building. The containers are an improvised assortment, from sneaker boxes to an orange milk crate scavenged from a supermarket, but they hold some of the rarest books on magic and the occult he has encountered. The collection belonged to Domenico and Eliana D’Agostino, a couple who died within months of each other; their four children and eleven grandchildren found the books unsettling.

The collection’s contents bring together the ordinary and the uncanny. Apollo finds a photograph of the elderly couple tucked into a grimoire, an incongruous domestic image amid their accumulated volumes of sorcery. While cataloging the books at home, he notices marginal notes in two different hands. In a third-edition folio of Witch Hunter Manual of the Blood Council, he discovers a postcard addressed to the D’Agostinos, dated 1945 and signed by Aleister Crowley. The basement sale thus turns the borough into the starting point of a discovery that reaches beyond the books’ apparent strangeness and into their history.

The Riverdale trip

A later estate sale sends Apollo to Riverdale, close enough to Washington Heights that Patrice Green’s tip leaves him little excuse to delay. The timing is difficult: Emma Valentine can take only six weeks away from work before losing her salary, so Apollo must bring Brian Kagwa with him. Emma cries as she leaves the baby, not because she distrusts Apollo, but because separating from her newborn feels unbearable and the family cannot afford for her to lose her job.

Apollo rents a Honda Odyssey through Zipcar, straps Brian into a rear-facing seat, and surrounds it with pillows. He drives no faster than fifteen miles per hour along the Henry Hudson Parkway, extending a twenty-minute journey to nearly an hour; on Dodgewood Road, even a street sweeper passes them. The route ends in a pocket of the Bronx described as almost rural: uneven single-lane streets, two-story houses, and large grassy plots. The destination is a large single-family house with a driveway and a two-car garage. A red 2001 Toyota Echo at the curb bears a bumper sticker reading LIBRARIAN OF ALEXANDRIA. Patrice has already arrived, despite living in southeastern Queens.

Work and fatherhood

The two sales give the Bronx contrasting roles in Apollo’s life. The D’Agostino basement rewards the dealer’s appetite for suspense and surprise: a low offer secures the collection, and the books disclose a remarkable provenance as he examines them. The Riverdale journey places that same professional urgency beside the demands of new fatherhood. Apollo still answers the call of an estate sale, but now his search includes a carefully padded car seat, a painfully slow drive, and Brian watching the bright sky through the passenger window. The borough’s book-hunting sites mark not only where Apollo finds books, but how the circumstances of his work change.