Walker Percy: In Gratitude

      Walker Percy was especially kind to the Maple Street Book Shop. Years ago, when he was teaching a course at Loyola, he started dropping by to sign books for us. He also let us give several autograph parties for him, even though, as we discovered later, they were a source of intense discomfort to him, as he hated forgetting people's names and perhaps hurting their feelings.
     When he couldn't handle signing parties anymore, he was agreeable to our sending out flyers announcing the publication of a new book. We would drive over to Covington with a car full of boxes of his new book for him to sign and inscribe.
     Customer response invariably yielded great piles of sometimes weird and intricate requests for special inscriptions. He would always try to accommodate and would only sometimes pass judgement in the form of a sad smile when confronted with instructions on a form to inscribe something like, "To a budding fellow writer who treads the same path and makes the same search . . . " or "To a bourbon-lover extraordinaire – You love not wisely but too well . . . don't blow your cool." Once in a while, he'd look