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Of all things sedate, still, dim and cool on a blistering summer forenoon was - and is - the orange brick, slate roofed, sandstone pillared building which is the Carnegie Free Library that is a kind of heart of Beaver Falls, for from its broad sandstone steps at least one President has addressed the town.

Here I, as a lad, found relief from the tedium of public education and the long summers that lay between in juvenile literature. Stories about Freddie the Pig, like popsicles were swiftly consumed and little remembered. Upon exhausting that vein of genius I pressed the librarian for "more pig stories" and she, hesitating, frowned slightly and said, "Well, there's this new book called Animal Farm, and it has pigs in it, I think, but it's in the adult section." I had encountered that phrase before, yet remained wholly indifferent to the existence of that arcane terrain.

"Well, if it's about animals, it's probably okay. My dad's read me the Jungle Book," I said in reply. We'd also read White Fang, Lobo, King of Carrumpaw and Moby Dick. And animals? Well, they were just that, weren't they? I'd seen draft horses and milk cows down on Uncle Tom's farm.

Umm-mm," she said, lifting her pince-nez eyeglasses, golden chain bright against the dark blue dress, to gaze slowly up at the huge oil painting of Jesus questioning the Elders, then slowly down at me, pondering possible repercussions that I did not know existed. "Well, I suppose it would be all right."

Strangely, although I can't remember one detail or the author's name of the Freddy stories, the one reading of Animal Farm stayed forever with me. Five decades later, the pigs' callous injustice toward Buck the horse and the other animals and their silly affectations of being a special order of animal angers me now as then in a way I'd never known in a sandlot ball game.

The building still stands, though the town's lighted theater marquees have not only darkened, but wholly disappeared. Jesus still stands, hand outstretched, above the librarian's arcuit mahogany book-bar, a central figure of youthful purity confronting both mystification and cynicism among the elders.

Fern Medley is still there too, but now frozen in oil hanging in the reading room, looking down pensively, now gone beyond the toil and trouble of the adult world which I've since learned all too much about.

But now I enter the basement with a wife of 35 years, for there are kept the "good" books, the flotsam and jetsam of literary and other worlds. We're drawn by the book exchange, a monthly discharge of surplus paper and hardbacks, freely given in exchange for a substantially equal exchange from a house overfull with books, from Hammond Innes to Graham Greene to Margery Allyngham.

Prim and elderly ladies preside there, seated on folding chairs behind a holding table against the far wall, sipping coffee from styrofoam cups.

"...and a half a cup of brown sugar, half a stick of butter, some cinnamon, and you know, get your oven up to about 350 ......

"...well, our pastor, you know, he..."

"...well, what about that Swaggart, an' him wavin' the Bible around an' all, I never...

Nearest them are two tables of Regencies, and these I eschew wholly, thankful that the balance of the day's offering had been purged of them.

Furthest from them. beyond the westerns and the swollen paperbacks of John Drury and Alan Jaks, and Loise Ludlurn, is a table of those books not easily categorized.

This is buck-a-box day, a purging of the inactive titles lodged in a side room with table after table of boxes along the walls, holding everything from Dune, to Buckley's Mongoose, to a wasteland of Book of the Month Club offerings.

Here decades of avid, snoozing, one-eyed, two-eyed reading hang as a cloud in my brain, siniultaneously a data base and screen, so with great delight I Spy not one but two 'copies of Monsignoir Qixote, by Graham Greene which contains delightful excurses into spontaneous theology, using wine bottles as a teaching tool to probe the mysteries of the Trinity. Both I bag.

And in glee I spy two more copies of A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in which a sacrificially living Zek, persecuted by a mindless bureaucracy was able to thank Jesus for the day of hardship, a feat I have difficulty with while 20 lbs, overweight sitting in a glorious sunset watching hummingbirds feed at nearby blossoms. Solzhenitsyn is bagged.

And buying books a buck a box, a Western, two mysteries, and Darkness at Noon, a telling tale, the adult version of Animal Farm. I'd read it in 1957 in college just before I'd received that nice letter from President Eisenhower that had begun, "Greetings..." If I had to choose between a dark, prison cell and Beaver Falls, even this town looked good, so I went with a sense of purpose. I was called to preserve Beaver Falls, Geneva College, Carnegie Library and all that.

Being There by Jerry Kosinski is a strange Billy Budd like tale of American mindlessness--hard bound - bagged.

The bag swells, glows, jumps about a bit, its contents creating a critical mass, a bookish soup of strange seasonings. Then there's a kicker, a grande finale, an ante-diluvian voice. The ladies are beginning to close up. Church news is tidied up, recipes exchanged, coffee cups rinsed, the few saucers wiped, a little makeup dabbed on discreetly. I approach the table leading out of 12th Street where Sam Allen, librarian and writer sits at the receipt of custom. Here I pick up a box and begin to stack into it from my shopping bag the dollar's worth. My eyes catch a familiar name, an older volume, signed within. I bag it, my mind on playback to a wintry December afternoon, a thick snow falling, and my grandfather arid father and mother and aunts huddled silently and still before the amber eye of the console, listening to that resonant, calm voice telling us, quite personally, of the events of the Sabbath morning, December 7th, 1941.

And there, in Carnegie's memorial building basement, was the signature of Lowell Thomas. Six bucks. I bought it, and paid a dollar for all the rest.

A mess? You bet. The mind of a fallen world, the perversions of the publishing industry, foibles and fictions too big to compass, true genius, the Gospel well told, all quietly waiting there like unexploded time bombs for life and memory. But for a buck a box, how can one lose?