Books were a lifelong passion for Graham Greene. Book collecting, the ownership of books, and writing in books absorbed Greene, who haunted the auction rooms and secondhand bookshops of provincial England in search of books. In his introduction to his bookseller friend David Low's autobiography, With All Faults (1973), Greene remarked that if he had not been a writer he would have liked to have been a secondhand bookseller. Greene read the journal The Book Collector and toward the end of his life he helped his nephew, Nick Dennys, to set up a secondhand book business, the Gloucester Road Bookshop in South Kensington, London.

The main source of information about Greene's book-collecting activities is The Annotated Library of Graham Greene (1993), an extensively annotated catalogue of the books and letters owned by Greene and passed to Dennys just before Greene's death in 1991. Approximately five hundred of the three thousand books...