Poetic Obituaries: Mohammed Hayawi, a bald bear of a man,

stood in his shop, the Renaissance Bookstore, along Baghdad's storied Mutanabi Street.

On shelves eight rows high rested books by communist poets and martyred clerics, translations of Shakespeare, predictions by Lebanese astrologers, a 44-volume tome by a revered ayatollah and a tract by the austere medieval thinker Ibn Taimiyyah.

from The Washington Post: The Bookseller's Story, Ending Much Too Soon

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