THE PREVAILING MOOD IS BOOKISH. For those not bitten by the bibliophile bug it's a little hard to explain. That current abomination known as the "kindle" is something no true book lover would associate with and I wish it a quick and deserved death as "kindling". No, there's that certain something about a book - the physical presence of it in your hand, on your shelf - that goes beyond a mere string of words. Books . . . the best books . . . are by definition travelers from the past into our present. Either the book is something you bought originally at some point in your past which brings to mind a certain time and place or else the book is far older and once had a place in someone else's library. As Helene Hanff once noted, there is nothing quite so wonderful as an old book falling open to a favourite page oft-revisited by some long ago reader or some marginalia drawing your attention to some well-loved passage across the gulf of time. Two book lovers: one from the past calling your attention to something meaningful across the years. No, the feel of a book in your hands, the tactile act of turning-over of the pages is not something that can be duplicated on a computer screen. The line upon line of books standing shoulder to shoulder on endless bookshelves can be a comforting oasis of quiet; it's easy to see why Lord Sepulchrave was so attached to his beloved personal library. There is (or should be) something of the lost, the out-of-the-way and the forgotten in the atmosphere of a good library. Finding a book on a shelf is absolutely a form of discovery. How delectable the feeling of walking into an old used book store where the light is always dim, the shelves tower overhead (preferably shelves of wood like the ones at 84 Charing Cross Road which had so absorbed age and dust that they no longer were their normal colour) and the aisles are narrow and claustrophobic. Walls and walls of books enveloping you; wrapping you in their book jackets as if to shield you from the buffeting of the world outside. The perfect old book shop should have more than a little of a sense of some dark corner of the library at Miskatonic University wherein Wilbur Whateley would feel at home stalking the stacks.

I am a confirmed lover of the neglected places of life: the off-the-beaten-path, the road less taken, the forgotten and overlooked, the mercifully free of crowds. I prefer the secluded corner to the wide-open spaces. My first home as a child had a large basement of exposed cinder-block walls. This subterranean dungeon contained the abandoned detritus left by a departed father: old-fashioned furniture, a desk, a work bench with tools hanging on the peg board above it - the outlines of hammers and saws exactly drawn around them in black magic marker. Sometimes the basement would flood after a heavy rain. Shades of Gormenghast! I discovered a few old paperbacks down there (2 of which appear above) as well as some old textbooks containing various short stories for somebody's long-ago English class. These books may have belonged to anyone; I still don't know. However, I have them all still. A much similar event to this happened in the young life of Stephen King (as relating in his excellent but dated study of horror "DANSE MACABRE"). The ten-year-old future horror author discovered a box of old Avon horror paperbacks that had belonged to his own absentee dad while prowling around his aunt's attic loft. It was, King said, something of a turning point for him, as it was the first time he would read "real" horror fiction. You see, these are magical things: books. One only has to ask H. P. Lovecraft how important his grandfather's attic library had been to him and how devastating it was when that fine old Providence house and the contents of said library had to be sold for bad business debts. Lovecraft never recovered. There was a Lovecraft paperback in that box of books Stephen King found: his first encounter with the writings of Lovecraft. A couple weeks after this momentous discovery the books disappeared no doubt due to the machinations of King's disapproving auntie. King shrugs off the loss as he writes of it but the sting was sharp enough to include the incident in his book decades later. Then, of course, the aforementioned forlorn Lord Sepulchrave so loved his books that he would lose his sanity after his library burned. This is indeed the extraordinary power and allure of books to those of us who hear their siren call.

There is just such a haven of books calling to me now; a place where the bookshelves do indeed go on and on across two storeys. A place that sits quietly in the small town of Mullica Hill on the banks of the Mullica River. Couched among the antique shops awaits Murphy's Loft. Back in the mid-1980's my cousin Loran and I both attended Glassboro State College (now Rowan University). During a blazing hot summer day in May, we both decided to ditch classes and make the not-inconsiderable drive to Mullica Hill. Along the way, the sky darkened to an angry purple and the roiling, lowering clouds assured us that we were in for a violent summer storm. Would we even make Mullica Hill before the downpour? Well, just as we pulled into the gravel drive which led us behind the house where Murphy's Loft lies, the skies opened up in a torrential rain. We ran for the door and stumbled into the bookstore. It was silent as a tomb; that particular complete silence which is amplified by the contrasting white noise of the rain outside. It was also very dark inside the book shop. No lights except for one tiny bulb burning over a desk - dimly picking out the faint edges of countless spines of books everywhere. Hello? Was anybody there? It didn't look like it. Perhaps the proprietor had been dragged into the walls by a huge, slug-like creature like one pictured on the cover of some old issue of WEIRD TALES. Presently, someone from the house did come down and turn on the lights; a buzzer on the door connected up to the house and alerted them when customers arrived. As the lights sprang into life, they revealed endless books books books. Where to start? The rest of the afternoon was spent in that magical place of old books. What could possibly be nicer than perusing through shelves of old books while a summer storm brewed outside? Nothing much can compare to it. I've never forgotten that afternoon and every few years I get the urge to go back to Murphy's Loft. It always happens in the summer. And it's happening again right now.