The Devil, Reader
You'd imagine it would be on the penultimate page, but he's far too charming for that...
There is, surely, only one book in Heaven1,; I therefore take it The Devil is the reader, and choose to believe he's unlikely to snatch a fellow bibliophile while embedded in a book. Given this, I scoot, 23 skidoo, from the end of one book to the start of another, be it only the first line, before he can pop up and drag me to that hell where all the world's lost literature resides, but stuck beyond adamantine bars.
19 Dec 2023, dangerously between "The Beggar's Benison of Anstruther" and "Denmark: Variations"
Notes:
1 As it happens, I'm a great fan of Bronze-to-Iron Age Transition literature, but it's not all I want to read for eternity.