Lloyd Alexander wrote a series of books for adolescents called the Chronicles of Prydain. The 4th of the series, Taran Wanderer, finds the hero searching for his lineage, confident that he is meant for greater honours than his title of Assistant Pig-Keeper.

He comes across one strange, eccentric man living in a ramshackle house built of bits and pieces. The man has a net out in the river that runs by his front door, catching the flotsam of the stream. What he needs he takes. What he doesn’t need he throws back. His thinking is that “sooner or later whatever you might wish comes floating along the river.”

It’s a philosophy that appeals to us. There is so much “stuff” out there; the river is in flood.

The River Trading Company is an eddy. We have a net out which catches the books and a few other items that we find interesting. We hold them for others to find. It is also a pool where you can throw what you don’t want or need, so it can drift into someone else’s keeping.