“I couldn’t handle all the judging,” she said. That’s my friend, who probably would prefer to remain anonymous, and that’s what she said when she sent me a photo of her new book cover, wrought from an express mail envelope and wrapped around Dead Until Dark, the first book in Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire series.

Are people going to think she’s reading porn? Yes, hopefully. But that possible embarrassment is preferable, both for my friend and for a lot of people, to being caught reading “low-lit” like Sookie Stackhouse.

But why share it with me? Because she bought it from me. Because she inquired, in a very small voice, whether my store had the book and, on finding we were sold out, whether I could discreetly order one for her.

I am a purveyor of guilty pleasures. A procurer of vices. As a bookseller at the “general interest” shop of one of the largest academic bookstores in the world and adjacent to the snootiest college campus in town , I see a lot of people buying their particular form of literary junk food.

And man, I indulge. Richard Condon, Thomas Disch, John le Carré, Raymond Chandler, Richard Stark, Patricia Highsmith, Robert Ludlum. . . .have you read The Friends of Eddie Coyle? By George V. Higgins? Do it. Lurid cover and all. And those are just some of the classics.

ANYWAY, a man and woman come into the shop late in the evening. It’s a particularly humid summer or they’d be wearing trench coats and, probably, fake noses. With an air of embarrassment, the woman approaches me and, in hushed tones, asks for some recommendations in the mystery section. “They’re not for me,” she says. The man lurks in a corner, watching us over the edge the new Marilynne Robinson. At 57^th Street Books, you see, the Mystery section is stocked with thrillers, detective novels and procedurals, murder mysteries, espionage, classic noir, NYRB’s Simenon reprints and a lot more—in short, a ton of really awesome books that people eat, in a manner of speaking, like candy. For other folks, it’s a wall of shame, a monument to their lack of willpower and inability to actually be as stuffy as they aspire to be or appear.

But sometimes you don’t want to read a history of antisemitism in Great Britain or a memoir of a gay soldier or of the importance of the Talmud in the formation of modern republics (!?).  No matter how well they’re written. Sometimes you want spies and sex and murder and, well, sometimes you want some good filthy fun.

Like Philip Kerr.

As I made my recommendations to the woman (There are new Parker novels out! Every Man Dies Alone!), the man, her husband,  sidled closer and closer, and finally joins the conversation. The books are for him, but he was too shy to ask. An extreme example, but true. Now that we’re finally talking, he refers to his new-found (or so he’d have me believe) penchant for what he calls “page-turners” a bit sheepishly. His wife called it “that thing you’re doing that I’m not doing” before retreating to the poetry section.

Why should they be ashamed? Shouldn’t books be page-turners, regardless of their other ambitions? One thought: the guilt is part of the pleasure. But I learned long ago that you can nest your snobbery in an appreciation for “low-lit,” if you even want to call it that, or you can elevate it to whatever heights you can imagine with sheer enthusiasm. And with introductions to these books by Luc Sante and William Vollman and Louis Menand and John Banville (who, as Benjamin Black, writes middling thrillers of his own) and publishers like NYRB and Europa Editions and the University of Chicago Press putting these out, it’s only a matter of time before the snobs get lost and only the readers survive, in the broadest sense of the population, and my friend can throw away her express mail envelope and read her vampire novel in public and in peace.