THE EIGHTY-SECOND PAGE

On a clear day, free from the impediment of any stops, one can make it to the book barns of Maine in under five hours. It took me two days and the weather could not have been clearer.

Only on such a trip can I relax my controls and let chance take me where it will.

One stop can be like the center of a spider web from which the network spreads from a first inquiry to the next shop in a neighboring village to a yard sale to a strip antiques mall to a junkyard to a library fair and back to another bookstore, where the search begins anew. Many such temptations lay between Woodstock and Wells, Maine, probably the bookiest burg south of the Canadian border. The miracle is that I made it in only two days.

The cheapest motel in the Wells vicinity became my headquarters. I made certain, though, it had a phone jack for my modem. The preceding night in Camden had been sans modem because the otherwise-elegant hotel had no rooms with phones that could be push-buttoned, nor even dialed. Hello Central!

It was important I keep my computer faculties alert because there was mischief afoot on the road as well as in the home.