As you wander from room to room, notice that no bed or couch is without both a shelf and an extra pile of books within arm's length. Both bathrooms are well stocked. There's a couple hundred cookbooks in the kitchen, plus the current piles of Chinese history and poetry waiting on the old oak hutch to be read today. All these tons of heavy books live precariously on top of an old cracked foundation built right over the tall grass prairie. The century-old beams of the house lean toward each other wearily, making crooked doorways, floors that slant toward the center. The bookcases are all shimmed and jerry-built to keep them upright. Each day new books arrive by mail, or after little side trips to library sales or used-book stores for bargains too good to be ignored.

Since I live in this chaos of print, I must always have wanted it. The nest we make is the mirror of our soul. Indeed, my first bedroom in an old farmhouse eight miles north was clotted with books too. A neighbor stored my bedroom furniture when my mother and father moved off the farm 35 years ago. She returned the bed and table last year. I opened the drawer and found it full of paper left there since 1961. The Complete Poems of Poe, a Gideon New Testament (to gather ammunition for argument), Unitarian pamphlets, 100 Best-Loved Poems, a 1960 Yale catalog (I had big dreams), and small notebooks full of poems, essays, and quotations. This was a teenager not likely to love Nixon, serve in Vietnam gladly, make any money, or amount to much in the American scheme of things. He didn't. The drawer told the truth. But he gathered books and music scores by the thousands, and now finds himself almost buried by them. He is out of shelf space again.

I love books in two ways. First, I read them like an addict. A day,even an hour or two,without print makes me edgy and hungry. I hide books in my car, both trunk and cubbyhole, in my office drawers, in side pockets of duffel bags. I buy small books to carry in my shirt pocket, just in case. But I love books also as they might be loved by an illiterate sensualist. I love the bite of lead type on heavy rag paper, the sexy swirls of marbled endpapers, the gleam and velvety smoothness of Morocco calf, the delicate India paper covering the heavy etching of the frontispiece, the faint perfume of mildew in old English editions, the ghost of smells of ink and glue in bindings. I feel my books. I run my hands over them as over skin or fur. I stroke them and sniff them and admire them from various angles in various light. The first time I visited a Russian Orthodox church (in Sitka, Alaska), I watched the black-mustached metropolitan emerge from behind his gold doors in a great cloud of incense. The choir surged louder in four almost-in-tune parts. The metropolitan bent ceremoniously down and kissed the Book. That's right, I thought! The right thing to do with a book! I will go home to Minnesota and light a candle and every night I will kiss a book. Tomorrow