As a child, I had one lone hobby, but its name didn't fully express the joy and color of it: reading. I sat atop a laundry basket in the airing cupboard and was transported through the glorious light and reedy dark of fiction. Libraries were sacred places, and the whisper in which you had to speak in them illustrated this fact. The librarian was a barometer with her box of cards. Casting her eyes down the list of books you had taken out and savored, she magically knew what you would like next.

"Joan Aiken, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. Hmmm, you seem to be enjoying an orphan theme this month. Do you want another orphan or are you bored of them yet?"

I loved orphans.

My yen for reading erased for my parents a multitude of other academic sin. When I was 10, my mother was told that the best hope the teachers saw for me was in a finishing school, where I would ski, learn to cook, and take classes in light dictation and shorthand.

"What about the reading?" my loyal mother asked the ancient headmistress.

"There's no career in liking books, dear. Mathematically, she is a dunce. She is clumsy and untidy. She should find a nice husband who is tolerant of these things." My mother, grim-faced, orchestrated a swift removal to a progressive school, where I was taught to play chess to increase my spatial awareness.

Then one day I seemed to be an adult, at least on paper, and it was books that were to play a huge part in an ill-fated love affair. I had visited an antiquarian bookshop in London and become enthralled by shelf after shelf of first editions. The church of reading had morphed into a cathedral: books inscribed with inky signatures and intimate messages to careless friends or to godchildren hard up for cash. (For what other reason would such a treasure find itself in my quivering hand?) Yellowing pages sent up a billow of olfactory comfort with each dry turn: the first book, whispers of somebody's attic; the next, a dark-painted study replete with apple-log fire and the occasional cigarette.

The book I chose and sent to the wooer will remain a secret. But the title spoke without my having to. We engaged in this game for some time, and as the relationship ripened, there didn't have to be a message in the title. We simply found and traded favorites. Because of my endless rare-bookshop haunting, I was put on the cover of Antiquarian Book Review