THE EIGHTY-FOURTH PAGE

Since the life of the book is either revived or murdered by the respective enthusiasm or the disaffection of the publicity department, what better port of entry for a little dissemination of pollution than that very department? Let my old publicity department be useful for once in its life. Little did it know the attack would be launched way up north in Portland, Maine.

Portland is only a couple of dozen miles and two or three dozen bookstores away from Wells, so it took little time to make it through the stores between the two.

I settled into a motel on Pleasant Street, making it homier by unpacking my cartons of books and arranging them by author within category: Bear, Crichton, Delaney, etc.; Grisham, Martini, Patterson, Patterson, etc.; Berkeley, Christie, Grafton, and so forth. The appreciable and appreciated I bound up in the plastic wrappers and repacked in the cartons far from the harm that could be inflicted by a distracted cleaning person.

Settling in for the evening with a six-pack of seltzer and three pepperoni slices from a nearby pizzeria, I pawed through my treasures and made a few selections from the Bear, Crichton, Delaney, etc. group. I was feeling technological, and though I needed no motivation for the morrow’s work, I could use the comforts of fiction.