In the title novella, "Bibliophilia," the unlikely protagonist is a postmenopausal university librarian pressed into reluctant duty as a "sex cop," whose job is to troll the stacks for students intent on illicit coupling among the classics. The stories are equally zany and wide-ranging, featuring, among others: a hair scientist who is going bald; an English professor trapped in a monkey cage; a mother who hands her toddler to a mugger while she rummages for money in her purse; a nightwatchman in a used-hubcap yard; and the owner of a landfill who is also the proud father of a teenage chess prodigy. What the fictions have in common is an astute mixture of comedy and pathos. Taking seemingly ludicrous premises, Griffith manages, in surprising ways, to render them poignant.