Keltham will wait it out.  He's not that fond of overpaying for large quantities of books.

"The way I see it," the boy says, "you're a powerful wizard and you're in a hurry for mysterious reasons so you aren't actually going to leave all your precious books here if they're four gold apiece."

      "I can get them somewhere else for two, disguised as not a powerful wizard, so I absolutely might be ordered to do that. He didn't find what he was looking for anyway, this is just for completeness."

".....two gold apiece and you tell me the big secret mystery of who you work for and what he wants with romances where someone dies and gets raised."

      "No deal. Two gold apiece and I get back to defending your stupid ass from demons and Kuthites, how about that."

"Absalom can defend itself just fine, thanks."

      "Two gold apiece for the books and two gold for you to buy yourself a treat, or a girl, whatever."

".....hmmmm."

       "Final offer, if you don't take it I will forcefully recommend to my mysterious patron that we leave without buying anything."

"Fine."

...maybe that proof his students gave for corporations being impossible in Golarion, because people would just bribe each other to act against corporate interests, was, in fact, correct.

Different bookshop! By the time they reach it they've made arrangements with the proprietor, a kindly old man who will happily fish out a large number of romances and mysteries that involve magic, priests, or resurrection.

Not the question Keltham starts with; he wants a book critical of Cheliax, ideally opened fairly straight to a section with the criticism.

"- but of course, young man, let me get it from the back room. I keep all the politically sensitive material in the back room, you know, so no one can say I was flaunting it."

He leaves, and returns shortly with On The Manifest Failures Of Character And Leadership Of Abrogail Thrune. It's stolen more or less wholesale from a popular critique of Taldor's Grand Prince with the city names changed, but if anything they're currently thinking that's safer than trying to compose well-written critiques.

...somebody wrote an ENTIRE BOOK critical of ABROGAIL PERSONALLY.  Who DOES that.  Who the ASS does that?  How does Abrogail live on a planet like this?

Message:  Book critical of Cheliax not of Abrogail personally.

....sorry, what?

Message:  I'm looking for books critical of policies and choices of Cheliax, the country.  Abrogail Thrune's character and leadership would only matter insofar as that led to Cheliax having bad policy stances, and I'd want the focus to be on Cheliax's policy stances rather than what somebody had to say about a person.

"- that's just ....not really how criticisms of a country are written? You either write that the King is wise and being misled by unwise advisors, or, as the author of On The Manifest Failures Of Character And Leadership Of Abrogail Thrune, you write about how the King is bad at their job. Or you write about the necessity of uniting to exterminate the people of Cheliax, but I actually don't stock that kind of nonsense, I think it's deleterious to the national character."

"...do you have any books critical of Cheliax which don't contain the sub-phrase 'Abrogail Thrune' in the title."

He can't buy this shit.  It's not just the implied disservice to Abrogail of rewarding an author who did that, it's the near-certainty that everything in the book is going to be wrong.  Sane people don't give books titles like that.

"I assume you do not want a similar book on her predecessor?"

"Her predecessor?"

"Infrexus Thrune? When he was in power I had brisk sales of "The Scandals And Idiocy of Infrexus Thrune" and after his death I did well with "The Best Thing Infrexus Thrune Ever Did For Cheliax Was Drown" though if I still have any copies they'll be hard to find, they stopped selling well a decade ago."

"Sorry, I'm not as familiar with Chelish history as I should be.  Infrexus Thrune drowned and then - his daughter Abrogail inherited the country?"

" - his niece, and, no, there was a civil war which she won. Do you just want - an ordinary history of Cheliax, maybe -"

"I'll take up to twenty different ones, if you've got that many."

"I assume that doesn't count different editions of the textbooks issued in Chelish schools? I have ten of those alone but they only change a bit here and there, most years."

"Sure, I'll take them all."  He's impressed with the putative Conspiracy if they've produced a textbook series with slight variations like that - though Asmodia is that smart, as is Carissa for that matter.  "What else you got?"

"A Tactical Account Of Thee Chelish Civil War, I don't know if military history is an interest of yours but it's acclaimed as a very well-researched work of military history, How The Church Claimed Cheliax, also mostly a military history but focused on the involvement of the church of Asmodeus, The Revival of the Empire, which I thought was shlocky nonsense, Avistan's Queen which gets indecorous in places but has some interesting details about court in Egorian..."

"That's four.  Anything else?  Reign of whatwashisname the drowned guy?  By the way how does drowning manage to be a permanent problem around here?"

" - he was drowned by his personal guard when they decided to go in for Abrogail. It wasn't itself militarily decisive, but, well, when that's how you die you can't particularly expect coming back to go well."

Okay, that's kind of, um.  Attractive and worrying at the same time, really.

"Any other books on Cheliax, critical or otherwise."

"I have specialty trade publications? Chelish grain imports by year for the last decade, Chelish wizarding education, Chelish military contracts..."

"I'll take those too.  But just the four books on Cheliax, aside from the textbooks and trade publications?  Can you bring those out?"

A loss of internal cognitive control, a flash of betrayed thought; Keltham is planning to ask for literally any other books at all putatively by any of those authors.