Only I didn't have my reading glasses when I bought it. I thought it said Arabazoglu, and I became excited to the point where I was on the brink of being thrown out of the shop, you know, jiggling about and jabbering, with wild eyes.
This is a long and tortuous tale. 1961. Wakari Hospital. Across the corridor was Maria, a Greek dancer about my age, classically Greek I suppose, though I have never been there.
Greece, for me, is women with long black hair running shrieking from white stone buildings and Leonard Cohen on an island singing his songs surrounded by the most beautiful women in all of Europe, two of whom I have actually met, but that's another story for another time.
So yes, Maria had long black hair. And she wore a green and white dressing-gown.
In the next bed was a little boy with a shaven head. He stayed under the blankets most of the time. And never spoke. Well, not to me, though I always said hello.
Maria said he spoke to her. The nurses said he had a brain tumour. Then he went away, I guess to that different place where you tell small children their very old cat has gone.
Maria was allowed to walk around the hospital, as was I, so we walked everywhere, especially to distant floors where we were probably not allowed.
If I had been asked to fill in forms about boys and girls back then, I would have definitely said Maria was a girl, but that was all I knew about girls, except that if you were picking playground teams for soccer or cricket, you picked girls last.
One day in the lift going up to the house surgeons' floor, definitely banned territory, Maria turned to me and said, ''Roy, don't spread this around, but I really fancy you.''
Phew. It was obviously my move, but I had metaphorically left the instruction manual under the bed pillow. I probably nodded, maybe scratched my head.
At Christmas, I looked her up in the phone book, so I could send her a Christmas card. She lived just off the northern section of George St. I hand-delivered to the box and then ran like the wind back to Roslyn.
Four years later, practising for the national table tennis championships with a Catholic boy who was girl-consumed with the passion and guilt only Catholic boys can muster, I was begged to accompany him on a double date, his intended conquest only willing to go if her friend could come too.
You'll love her, she's gorgeous, said Catholic boy, Maria Arabazoglu. Yes, that Maria.
My life could have changed right there.
I could have re-met Maria, apologised profusely for my insipid reaction to her lovely words in the Wakari Hospital lift, we could have married preposterously young and could now be living on a Greek Island selling Leonard Cohen trinkets and key-rings, our 23 gorgeous children scattered all over Europe.
Could.
But I politely declined. I still wasn't ready for single dates, let alone double ones.
I have to crawl red-faced from my fantasy parallel universe and admit I had never given Maria Arabazoglu a second thought until I saw the 20c book last Wednesday and thought her name was on the cover. But no, with reading glasses affixed back home, I saw the error of my eyes.
But by hokey, Orania Papazoglou is pretty close. A pen name perhaps, clinging proudly to a vestige of the family name?
Wikipedia said yes, a pen name, but for Jane Haddam.
A pen name for a pen name perhaps?
No, said Wikipedia, don't be silly.
But Jane Haddam does have long black hair.
Oh well, there you go then. There is no Arabazoglu in our phone book any more.
Google, Facebook and Old Friends have come up flagrantly Arabazogluless.
All I have is this 314-page hardback crime thriller which features ''a web of depraved sexuality''. I will assuredly read it.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
