Rare finds

“Now you’re in the first-edition zone,” Towles said, opening the glass doors directly behind his writing desk. “And now you’re really into heroes: Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Conrad, Emily Dickinson.” (Towles also listed the Transcendentalists in this league; he was born and raised in the Boston area and said that “a lot of the personality aspects of Emerson and Thoreau are second nature to me.”)

“This is kind of crazy, just time coming around the corner,” he said, pulling one modest-size blue book off the shelf. “This is a first edition of ‘The Great Gatsby.’ It was owned by Dorothy Ann Scarritt,” he noted, pointing to her signature inside the book. “This is August 1925. She later becomes famous because she is Oppenheimer’s secretary at Los Alamos. She’s like the second employee at Los Alamos; she’s there the entire time and she organizes his entire life. She’s involved with bringing everyone in, getting them set up.”

Scarritt’s signature has a lot of company among Towles’s books. A signed copy of Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize lecture — a small book nestled inside a larger case — was a gift from his wife. Towles is a longtime fan of Dylan’s and mentioned him in the same sentence as Rimbaud and T.S. Eliot, so when the singer received the Nobel in literature in 2016 to divided opinion, Towles was ecstatic. “It was not controversial for me at all.”

Going back a century further, Towles took down a copy of Proust signed by its translator, C.K. Scott Moncrieff, to Joseph Conrad in 1922.

On a shelf across the room, Towles has another edition of Proust’s work, as well as several books about what he calls “Proust-y stuff” — “different things about Proust — Proust’s letters, paintings in Proust, the music of Proust …”