> Also one must be ruthless with those who ask, “What is the most expensive book you’ve got here?” Often it is the male of the species trying to impress the female.

That's wild to me. What a weird thing. Is this primarily an Americanism? One of the things I miss the most about the UK is the bookshops, the second-hand bookshops, the weird one-pound-per-book barns in random villages, the book festivals, the charity shops where every book is a pound.

The idea of caring about, or wanting, a _book_ because of how expensive it is, is just so genuinely alien to me that I've gotten stuck on that sentence.