Bibliophile Paul Collins finds a town that shares his passion If you’re reading this, you probably love books to one degree or another. For Paul Collins, author of Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books, that love is taken to the nth degree. His passion for all things biblio led him to Hay-on-Wye, a small Welsh village on the Britain/Wales border with only 1,500 inhabitants and 40 antiquarian bookstores. “There are easily several million books secreted away in these stores,” Collins explains, “and in outlying barns around the town; thousands of books for every man, woman, child and sheepdog.” Leaving behind a comfortable cosmopolitan existence in San Francisco, Collins traveled with his wife Jennifer and their young son, Morgan, “across the pond” to buy a house, settle in the country and make “The Town of Books” their home. Sixpence House is the result of that journey, but it is more than a delightful travelogue of the family’s adventure. It is the story of books themselves: how they get written, read, or not read, how they come into print and fall out of print, how they are made and how they are destroyed. And, last but not least, it is the story of how a young couple, their child in tow, became brave enough to follow their dreams. “I’ve always wanted to write,” Collins says happily. “Ever since I was a kid, that’s what I wanted to do, and I’m getting to do it. It’s wonderful.” Making life even more wonderful is a wife who has also been bitten by the book bug. “Jennifer is a painter,” Paul explains, “but she writes as well. She’s just finished a young adult book and is now to the point of looking for an agent.” While a quaint, obscure little village crammed to the rooftops with books might seem the perfect place for a couple of artistic wordsmiths, the idyllic setting proves to be a difficult place to buy that “perfect” home. First of all, the buildings in Hay-on-Wye are old, and secondly, determining the condition of a home for sale is up to the buyer. This compels them to commission, and pay for, an engineering survey for any house they seriously consider purchasing. “In America, you can pretty much house hunt for free until you get to the point of signing on the dotted line,” Collins notes, “but in Britain and Wales it gets very expensive very quickly.” Tagging along from an armchair on this side of the pond, however, is great fun for the reader: “Heavy oak floorboards creak beneath our feet,” Collins writes, “immediately to our left is a dark and crowded stairwell. This is a weighty structure, the sort of moany old house under constant compression by the very years themselves; it is not airy.” Collins describes the kitchen of this particular house with his characteristic tongue-in-cheek humor as “distinctly of 1950 vintage; you half expect an Angry Young Man with a Yorkshire accent to step out and start yelling about working down in the bloody mines.” In storybook fashion, as their money supply dwindles Collins gets a job working for the self-proclaimed “King of Hay,” a man named Richard Booth, a book dealer and the owner of Hay Castle where Collins finds himself employed to sort through a veritable realm of books. The task is daunting, but the job does allow him to pursue one of his favorite pastimes: meandering from one idea to another. “I’m always going off on tangents,” he admits. “I see something and I go, ‘Oh, that looks interesting,’ and in the process of tracking one story I end up finding five others. So I’m never lacking for material. But because of that, I have a hard time imagining myself writing a strictly single subject book. I’ve decided that’s not what my talent is in. It’s more in throwing myself out there in several directions and hoping that other people will find it interesting as well.” His first book, Banvard’s Folly: Thirteen People Who Didn’t Change the World, capitalized on that same talent. “I guess I have a short attention span,” he says, laughing. “Any one of those 13 people could have warranted a book, but I’d rather write about the 13 and let someone else write about one particular person.” This meandering method works well for Sixpence House. It allows the author to wander off the path, stopping for an anecdote here, a poignant moment there; it allows him time to dust off a book for us, and let us glimpse the ideas and emotions of someone long-forgotten, their words, held in ink, still able to move our minds and hearts; it allows him to tell us stories within his story and to make a quiet, but undeniable statement about the power, the endurance, and the magic of books. But how does a bibliophile feel about computers? “I think computers are a blessing and a headache,” Collins says. “I use computers and databases a lot in my historical research. They’re a tremendous tool, but on the other hand, you have to know what you’re looking for in the first place. And they’re a very unstable medium.” But with Sixpence House written and another book in the works, Paul Collins feels good about the future of his obsession and his livelihood. “Paper lasts for hundreds of years,” he says confidently. “I think books are here to stay. Not only do they have an aesthetic pleasure to them, they’re cheap, they’re portable, and they last a long time.” That should make any lover of books sleep a little more soundly tonight! Linda Stankard is a writer in New York.

As preface to his remarkably honest memoir, What Becomes of the Brokenhearted, best-selling novelist E. Lynn Harris offers this epigram: "Work like you don’t need the money, dance like nobody is watching and love like you’ve never been hurt."

Similar grand passions sweep across the pages and back through the years as the ebullient Harris recounts his former double life: by day, the quintessential "buppie," pulling down big bucks as an IBM computer salesman; by night, a closeted gay man searching for storybook love in the callous shadows of the urban club scene.

Hard work, a passion for soul music and the staunch resolve to remain a hopeless romantic enabled him to overcome depression, a suicide attempt and the loss of numerous friends to AIDS. His is a cautionary tale about a cautionless time, an era that fortunately allowed gentle souls such as Harris a few bad choices. What Becomes of the Brokenhearted is not a question here, but an affirmation, perhaps even a prayer.

Not many new writers would have the audacity to offer up their memoirs at the tender age of 48. Then again, Harris’ life has been far from ordinary and closer in truth to his eight larger-than-life multiracial, multi-sexual romances, including Invisible Life (1991), Abide with Me (1999) and Any Way the Wind Blows (2001). Harris actually embarked upon his memoirs seven years earlier, both to exorcise his demons and to satisfy fans curious to know where his real life ends and his fiction begins.

"Even as I was spending the last seven years going through my past, people kept saying, why now?" he says by phone from his Atlanta home. "It was very difficult because every time I would go back and write it and read what I had written, I had to relive that part of my life, where now life is so good. I guess that makes you stronger in a lot of ways."

Growing up poor in the shadow of his abusive stepfather Ben in Little Rock, Arkansas, Harris developed an early ability to turn adversity into advantage, lemons into lemonade. The temperamental Ben always called him Mike, after a neighborhood tough, preferring it to his "sissy" given name, Everette Lynn. Harris recounts one Easter when Ben went into a rage and ripped the boy’s brand new Sunday suit because he had buttoned the jacket "like a little girl." His mother and three sisters, dressed in their Easter finery, could only look on in horror.

"At some point in each of our lives we realize that life is not necessarily going to be fair," the author says. "That was the day for me that I knew I was going to have to pick up some skills to survive." When life got messy, he would retreat into the refuge of his imagination, a lush, passionate world far removed from Little Rock. One of the first black students to attend the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, the gregarious Harris excelled, becoming the first black cheerleader and yearbook editor. After graduation, IBM recruited him for a sales position in Dallas, where he was once again the oddity, a young black liberal arts grad in an office of older white engineers. It was another world, a white heterosexual world, but one he would conquer with his natural salesmanship. He set his sights on a six-figure salary by age 29; he achieved it at 26.

Harris recalls being suddenly assigned to host two corporate CEOs on a high-stakes junket to San Francisco, a mission for which he was woefully unprepared at 23. Halfway through the first-class flight west, he turned to the two industry titans and admitted that he didn’t have a clue about what he was doing.

"It really helped me a lot because they taught me and they had a great time," he says.

By day, Harris was a straight arrow; by night, he was carefully exploring the gay bars wherever he found himself: Dallas, New York, Washington, D.C. It was the height of the disco era. Although Harris loved the nightlife, it didn’t love him back.

"One of the group used to jokingly refer to me as such a Mary Tyler Moore-type of person, and that was from my Southern upbringing," he says. "Everybody wanted me to be their little brother; they wanted me as a friend. I don’t know if it was the angels protecting me but a lot of these men that I would have jumped at the chance to be intimate with later died [of AIDS]."

"I was basically still trying to be Mr. All-American who just happened to be gay; I mean, the things that I was interested in sports, the theater and dating I wanted it to be romantic. And I kept getting messages like, hey, you don’t get to be romantic in this life. I just could not believe it was all about sex."

The high life did offer temporary relief from chronic depression, but at a heavy cost. Shortly after his 1990 suicide attempt, Harris sobered up, moved to Atlanta and began writing a fictionalized account of his life as a gay black man. When his manuscript for Invisible Life elicited no response from New York publishers, he published it himself and shrewdly placed it in beauty parlors and bookstores where he knew he would find an audience for his thoroughly modern romances.

"Some people can’t understand women going crazy over me at my signings, almost like a rock star, knowing my sexuality. I think it’s because they know my heart and we’ve been through a lot of the same things together."

Harris applauds the recent Supreme Court ruling on gay rights and the growing acceptance of gay marriage.

"I think that the move by the Supreme Court is a real relief. I just hope that people will take it slow. Sometimes so much injury can be done when people feel they are being forced to do something or accept something. I think it’s hard for straight people to understand what it’s like to be gay, but I think more of them are willing to open their minds about the individuals."

If he could, would he change his sexual preference? "No. Ask me that three or four years ago, it might have been different. If a genie came and granted me a wish of not being gay, would I take it? Yes, if it was a genie, because that would be fantasy. If God came, I would say no because that is obviously the way he wanted me."

Jay MacDonald is a professional writer based in Mississippi.