Old books that we have known but not possessed cross our path and invite themselves over. New books try to seduce us daily with tempting titles and tantalizing covers.

In no way am I demeaning writing or any other form of art because it's popular. What I'm saying is that anything fed into the industrial machinery to comply with rules of size and length and shelf-life has a hard time surviving as art.

It has always been my experience that, whatever groupings I choose for my books, the space in which I plan to lodge them necessarily reshapes my choice and, more important, in no time proves too small for them and forces me to change my arrangement. In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long. Like Nature, libraries abhor a vacuum, and the problem of space is inherent in the very nature of any collection of books.

I always knew that I wanted to live with books, even as a child, because we traveled a lot. Home was the book to which I came back every evening.

Our society accepts the book as a given, but the act of reading -- once considered useful and important, as well as potentially dangerous and subversive -- is now condescendingly accepted as a pastime, a slow pastime that lacks efficiency and does not contribute to the common good.

Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.

If justice takes place, there may be hope, even in the face of a seemingly capricious divinity.