Free The City of Dreaming Books by Walter Moers

someone might try to rob him of his haul.
    That someone was Rongkong Koma, Bookholm’s most notorious and dangerous Bookhunter, an evil individual who owed all his successes to the fact that he never went looking for rare books himself but stole them from others on principle. Having learnt of Regenschein’s grandiloquent announcement, he lay in wait beneath the bookshop from which his prospective victim was due to emerge. That was all he had to do apart from spearing Regenschein in the back with an iron javelin.
    Fortunately for Regenschein, Rongkong Koma missed his heart and merely pierced his shoulder. A ferocious duel ensued. Although unarmed, Regenschein managed to inflict so many wounds on Koma with his canine teeth that the rapacious Bookhunter lost a great deal of blood and took to his heels, but not without swearing eternal enmity.
    The Vulphead only just made it to the surface before passing out and did not regain consciousness for a week. He had lived up to his ambitious predictions, however, and the Live Newspapers were quick to spread the word. Overnight, Colophonius Regenschein had become the most famous Bookhunter of all.
    He could also have become the best-paid Bookhunter of all, because collectors and dealers bombarded him with offers. But Regenschein turned them all down. Although he resumed bookhunting when he had recuperated - this time armed and forever on his guard against Rongkong Koma - he kept most of the books he acquired for himself. His ultimate intention soon became clear: Colophonius Regenschein aimed to collect one copy of every last book on the Golden List. He managed to do this in an incredibly short space of time and he also returned to the surface laden with other books which, although not on the list, were valuable in the extreme. These he sold, using the proceeds to purchase one of the handsomest old buildings in Bookholm, where he set up the Library of the Golden List as a place in which rare works could be studied under supervision for scholarly purposes. Colophonius Regenschein thus became Bookholm’s greatest hero: a combination of adventurer, patron and paragon.
    Despite his wealth and fame, however, and although his expeditions became ever more hazardous, Regenschein could not resist the lure of the catacombs. He was as hated down there as he was popular in the world above. Some of the most brutal Bookhunters dogged his footsteps and tried to steal his finds. They included Nassim Ghandari, nicknamed ‘The Noose’ because he crept up behind his victims and garrotted them with cheese wire; Imran the Invisible, so called because he was thin enough to be mistaken in the dark for a pit prop - until you were suddenly transfixed by a poisoned arrow from his blowpipe; Reverberus Echo, whose talent for vocal and acoustic mimicry led his victims astray and lured them into death traps, after which he cannibalised them to cover his tracks; and Lembo ‘The Snake’ Chekhani, a Bookhunter who had sunk so low, morally speaking, that he wriggled along on his belly camouflaged in manuscripts, as supple and attenuated as his nickname implied. Tarik Tabari, Hunk Hoggno, Erman de Griswold, Hadwin Paxi, Azlif Khesmu, Horgul the Hairless, ‘Blondie’ Snotsniff, the Toto Twins - Colophonius Regenschein became involuntarily acquainted with all of these Bookhunters and several more besides, but none of them managed to rob him of a single book and most sustained severe injuries in the course of their encounters with him. Some abandoned the profession and others steered well clear of him in the future. Only one repeatedly and deliberately challenged his supremacy: Rongkong Koma the Terrible. The most fearsome of all Bookhunters lay in wait for Regenschein again and again, doggedly thirsting for revenge, and the two of them fought almost a dozen strenuous duels from which neither emerged a clear winner, usually because they broke off hostilities by reason of exhaustion. One such confrontation mentioned by