“Early on in my East Bay ramblings, I found my way into Serendipity Books, on University just up from San Pablo. Sometimes you’re in Ali Baba’s cave and you don’t even realize it. Used to be that every bookman in the area had an anecdote concerning Peter Howard, the legendarily perverse and curmudgeonly proprietor of that cavernous establishment. Peter is now gone, and Serendipity is no more, but the quality of the stock was such that for years afterwards people gossiped about where all the books ended up. Arranged on the floor amidst the general chaos were paper grocery sacks of unpriced books from the library of the late Gus Blaisdell, proprietor of Living Batch Bookstore in New Mexico, which had published the first complete version of Ronald Johnson’s Ark, which went out of print almost immediately and became fabulously expensive until it was reprinted years…