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The Winnipeg Christ and Dali kept up a long-term friendship, as Stewart does with so many of his customers. Every time I enter the store, people are sitting on a small bench across from the till waiting to talk to him as they would wait for a physician.

“You meet some of the most interesting people you’ll ever imagine,” says Stewart. One visitor included the archivist from New York’s legendary, century-old Explorers Club. She was talking to Stewart when she stepped back and almost fell over “a chap from the British Library,” who happened to be one of the last surviving members of Britain’s India Office, the department that governed colonial-era India from the mid-19th century until its independence in 1947. The man was in the city researching marine charts and maps and had been on his knees poring over books on the floor.

On another occasion Stewart came across Umberto Eco -- best-selling Italian novelist (The Name of the Rose), learned semiotician, and one of the world’s preeminent book collectors -- searching in a corner. The store ships books around the globe to collectors like Eco.

According to George Fetherling, the author or editor of more than 50 books, “Don is not a secondhand-book dealer. He is a private-sector scholar, a true antiquarian. To succeed in that business, you have to know a little about everything. Don has succeeded because he actually knows quite a bit about everything.”

Fetherling relates many of the woes facing all antiquarians: the trend toward appointment-only shops; the high rents that are driving antiquarians to the ‘burbs; the large space needed to house inventory that may go unsold for years; the spread of Web-based companies that consider themselves booksellers but lack the requisite knowledge.

“I don’t want to create the impression Don is the last dinosaur,” says Fetherling. “That’s not the case. But he is our senior and most knowledgeable dinosaur.”

Books were once extraordinary objects, says Stewart. Librarians and booksellers were the guardians. “Now books end up in Dumpsters all the time. They’ve become devalued in the eyes of society.”

MacLeod’s illustrates that Dumpster diving is a public service (if there was any doubt). Stewart shows me a copy of Pablo Picasso’s Women retrieved from a city Dumpster. The finder was rewarded $100 for the stunning edition, which is now priced at $200. On other occasions, Dumpster divers have brought in gold sovereigns, 17th-century Dutch maps, and countless other rare treasures.

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