WHAT RIDERS READ.(The Talk of the Town)(Housing Works Bookstore Cafe's Meredith Blum and Gordon Moore )

The other day, Meredith Blum and Gordon Moore went to Penn Station to collect twenty-four boxes of books from the Lost Property Unit of New York City Transit. The books had been left on trains and buses and in subway stations. Blum and Moore are employees of the Housing Works Bookstore Cafe, on Crosby Street, which sells donated books and music. Blum is small and blond, with delicate features, and Moore is tall and thin. Blum works in the bookstore office, and Moore helps with Internet sales. They drove up Eighth Avenue in a borrowed white van.

Housing Works does not usually pick up books; it expects people to deliver them. The store receives about fifty boxes a day. If someone calls and says, for example, that his or her companion just died and left shelves of books, "we usually try to interview them carefully, so that we don't end up with thirty boxes of romance novels," Blum says. An employee of the M.T.A. named Anant Patel had called and said that the Transit Authority had been collecting books for a year and wondered if Housing Works would like them.

Blum and Moore parked on Eighth Avenue at Thirty-fourth Street, and went down into the subway. At the end of a long hall was a door on which was written "Lost Property Unit." Beyond it was a cinder-block vestibule with a thick window, like one at a pawnshop. Moore knocked on the window, and a young woman opened the door. Among the people standing around and sitting at metal desks in a room behind it was Anant Patel. He gave Blum his card, which said, "Operations Specialist, Asset Recovery--Rejected Material, Material Division." Blum and Moore followed him to a room where boxes of books were piled. Around them, on metal shelves lined up against each other like files in a doctor's office, were rows of purses.

Moore began loading boxes onto a hand truck. "You guys take Bibles?" Patel asked. "We just got rid of Bibles, maybe a week ago. Ten boxes."

"We'd probably have a hard time with that," Blum said. She looked at Moore, and he nodded.

Patel shrugged. "We gave them to a Bible society," he said. "They seemed glad to have them."

Blum signed some papers on a clipboard. ...