THE FORTY-EIGHTH PAGE

I am to be found at this moment on this page in a patchwork house in the Catskills. Of post and beam construction, it is a deconstructed barn; its bones are out-of-print woods like hemlock and chestnut, long unheeded for popular usage when plastic siding can make a House Beautiful. The windows and doors are from a century-and-a-half-year-old railway station also declared out-of-print.

I would have been preferred living in something similar to the Universal Pictures old dark house of the thirties, which thrilled me on the television of my youth. I realize that the old dark house was only a collection of sets, but if they could all be put together--the burnished staircase to the hellish torments of the upstairs rooms where madness reigned, the fireplaces large enough for a starlet to walk into, the windows big as barn doors when they thundered open and the lightning illuminated the shredded face of Karloff and his assigns--I could be a happy camper.

Someday, perhaps, someone will view this as an old dark house and see in it certain Gothic characteristics which presently escape the owner. For him, it is but a place to keep his books. Often the shades are drawn and the shutters shut, but it is not to provide privacy, rather to protect the jacket spines of the innocents arrayed from floor to ceiling on their shelves from sunlight and other enemies of the book.