In the end it was primarily Robert Silverberg who took the hit. I'd gone to pull a copy of Dying Inside off the shelf to check the publication date. The book seemed stuck to the bottom of the shelf and when I pulled it off, I saw the bottom was black with some kind of page-eating alien mold from Antares. I checked the other books on that bottom shelf. All of the them, the same; damaged beyond repair. I had to put them down, no choice, and the bookcase along with it, and the carpet beneath that the bookcase for good measure. I then checked every other shelf in my office, 135 shelf-feet to make sure the alien plague hadn't spread.
But the damage was done, and Silverberg took the brunt of it, the alien attacking every single one of my Silverberg books, including 3 copies Dying Inside, 2 leather-bound, one paperback, one signed. His memoir Other Spaces, Other Times was a victim. Time of the Great Freeze and Hawksbill Station and To Live Again and The Book of Skulls, which Silverberg recommended to me after I told how much I loved Dying Inside; The World Inside, and Up the Line, perhaps the greatest time travel story of all time, omitted from Barry Malzberg's The Greatest Time Travel Stories of All Time for nothing more than its length; all of them victims, all of them caught in a mass homicide by a mindless alien bacteria. Clifford D. Simak was also found among the dead, City and a Masters of Science Fiction leather-bound edition of Way Station.
I've already started the search to replace the lost. A signed edition will be hard to come by. The last time I saw Silverberg was at the 2013 World Science Fiction convention in San Antonio, Texas. But I care less about the signature and more about the stories, and so I am working to replace the losses. The bookcase has already been replaced, the carpet cleaned, the alien purged. Now there is simply a 2-1/2 foot gap to fill, the only empty shelf space in my office, and it looms large at the corner of my vision late these days.
