Hidden in the heart of a bustling city is a man who can find what is close to the heart but hidden.
"You could call me a book detective," Toby Wools-Cobb says.
"I specialise in finding books you cannot find with a simple Google search — it doesn't turn up but you know it exists, somewhere."
Some who visit Mr Wools-Cobb in a colonial-era building near Launceston's Brisbane Street Mall are searching for long-lost children's books casually discarded at a garage sale.
Others seek provocative works that have been scrubbed from history, or who have vivid memories of books but not their titles.
"I take the information and I aim to be within seven days to get back to him with the book," Mr Wools-Cobb said.
Searching for long-lost titles
Mr Wools-Cobb uses the investigative skills from his career as a librarian and the archaeological expertise from his studies in Egyptology to find copies of books from his shop, Quixotic Books.
Special algorithms help him scan the millions of titles listed in publisher databases, but he also must understand the "life cycle of books to figure out where they may have ended up".
Mr Wools-Cobb said a single book had several editions that entered the world in multiple ways, from online marketplaces and big book retailers to specialty stores and promotional events.
The books are acquired by individuals, schools, libraries and businesses which then re-sell them, give them away or abandon them on dusty bookshelves and in cluttered storage rooms.
Understanding how books moved in and out of the world helped Mr Wools-Cobb to find a special edition of a young adult novel that "hadn't entered the second-hand market".
"I managed to find some information that the author had partnered with a book chain to do a promotion," he said.
He tracked down the shop and asked the staff if any promotional stock had been left behind in the storeroom.
"They were saying, 'Oh, we don't have it in stock on our system', but sure enough, they go out and sheepishly come back and say, ‘We've got a whole box of them'.
"That was a super-proud moment."
Even bestsellers face extinction
While many who visit Quixotic Books are desperate to find obscure titles, even bestsellers can become endangered.
Mr Wools-Cobb said if a title was ubiquitous, people felt little need to save their copy because they believed they could always pick up another at their local book shop.
"But if everyone is doing that over many years, books printed in the millions may disappear," he said.
Alongside his detective work, Mr Wools-Cobb also saves weird and wonderful books that face extinction.
He looks through gigantic spreadsheets of unsold books that are returned to publishers and imports any title that piques his interest.
"It's the hardest and most enjoyable part of my job, to pick my selection. I might take three months to trawl through all these titles.
"In the first year of business, I've looked through over 280,000 titles."
A second life for unusual books
Through this process, Mr Wools-Cobb has given a second chance to books such as Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty and The Thackery T Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases.
And while it may be sacrilege for a librarian to say so, Mr Wools-Cobb believes it is a mistake to try and save every single book ever printed.
"So if you try to save 1,000 books, through that effort you're probably going to miss actually understanding that 100 books among those are the actual, precious hardcovers."
But for Mr Wools-Cobb, even a book with questionable literary value is worth saving if it has a strong impact on the reader or sentimental value.
"As long as the book generally does mean something to you, that's better than hoarding books for books' sake."
