If Spikes was a breathless ride, Bibliophilia is a veritable roller coaster, starting with the almost novel-length title pice whose unlikely protagonist is a postmenopausal university librarian pressed into reluctant duty as a sex cop, trolling the stacks for any students intent on illicit coupling among the classics.The stories are equally zany and wide-ranging, in settings as diverse as southern Louisiana and North Africa, and featuring, among others: a hair scientist who is going bald; a mother who hands her toddler to a mugger while she rummages for money in her purse; and a nightwatchman in a used-hubcap yard. What the fictions have in common is an astute mixture of comedy and pathos: taking a seemingly ludicrous premise, Griffith manages, in some surprising way, to render it poignant.