THE NINETY-THIRD PAGE

Convinced now that there was a god, an avenging god, I returned to my book haven with a happy heart and a vast load of volumes to unpack. It was amazing how few had to do with the Manhattan Project. It simply makes sense to buy a hardcover book for five bucks when it would cost two or three times more in paperback, I reasoned. And it seems so easy to add just one or two more books to the back of the car as you tootle down the road.

The challenge arises in shelving, as we well know, having seen this little QuickTime movie several times in earlier pages. The rooms were beginning to look like those of years of yore in Manhattan when the verticals began admitting the horizontals to slumber across them. The very thought of Jong lying atop and straddling James Jones and Ben Jonson--oh rare, Erica Jong. And Wilde on Wilder--not a pretty sight. The walls began to look pixelated, taking on patterns within the shelving grids. It was the look that would make an interior decorator leave his profession and take up painting on velvet and hammering copper sheets into cookie trays.

For the book lover, it’s the real thing; perhaps not a living, but a way of life and death.