Seemed like a reasonable meditation to me. I was able to figure out pretty easily that you were talking about an O'Reilly book named "Spidering Hacks".

Have you tried emailing O'Reilly? Perhaps they would be happy to email you the code. (Side note: if I check the book out of a library, am I a customer?)

If you stare at that battered scraper for long enough, I bet you could see an animal in it.