Hailing from rural Ontario, the author made his way to London in 1973 and became a lifelong antiquarian bookseller as well as poet and travel writer (hence a factotum: one with diverse activities or responsibilities). One becomes a bookseller almost always by accident and such was the case with Kociejowski. Along the way he worked in a series of legendary London shops: Bertram Rota Booksellers, Maggs Brothers, for the poet and bookseller Peter Jolliffe, owner of the Ulysses Bookstore in the heart of Bloomsbury, and lastly for Peter Ellis, bookseller, now consigned to the internet. We are introduced to some of the famous such as the writer Geoffrey Hill but more often to beloved and eccentric book-loving customers as well as “collectors” who are not necessarily book readers. Factotum is a requiem for an increasingly lost world as one by one the shops of London close: “A city drained of life.” The quotes are evocative and haunting: “[W]e are about to be robbed [by the internet] of the mystery and serendipity of the old bookshop…how the cornbread crumbles.” He recalls all the fine and valuable books that he handled over the course of a long career but above all the remarkable people that he met and worked with along the way.