Donald O’Van runs the bookstore.  His shop looks a bit like an empty living room, with those few books he keeps on display set out on a coffee table between two couches at the center of the shop.  A massive square oriental rug covers the entire floor, a pool of red that consumes the sparse 40 watt light from the wall sconces.

Donald is an older man of smaller proportions, with thinning white hair and over-large black framed glasses.  He tends to keep his hands in the pockets of his tweed jacket as he talks, his head tilted slightly to the right.  There’s a vague smell of Ivory soap about him.

His assistant, a young lady from Singapore named Pinny, offers visitors tea and shuttles books from the back room to the front at a signal from Donald.  It’s not her actual name, but that’s what Donald calls her.  It’s what he’s always called his assistants.

Pinny is currently holding a leather backed solander box in her tiny white-gloved hands.  It is the box Donald asked her to find last night down in the stacks.  The Sibyllenbuch something-or-other.  Donald said a visitor would be wanting it. He’s talking to a visitor right now, in fact, an even older man with watery blue eyes and hands like paper claws that shake slightly as he tries to balance his teacup and saucer. 

Donald O’Van is a tenant of Lady Lillian Coffin, the Owner of Peddler’s Row.  And he is most definitely a magician, Pinny decides, when the visitor asks whether Donald has the Sibyllenbuch something-or-other, and Pinny is there to place it gently on the coffee table between them.