I first met you in a dress boutique in Old Town, Eureka. My wife was trying on pants and examining scarves. I noticed you reclining on top of some outdated fashion magazines.

I was sitting in the chair they save for bored husbands. Soft music played on the changer at my elbow. And there you were, a bold blue title sprawled across your battered face, above a portrait of the Duke of Wellington spying on Napoleon's troops. An aide gestured heroically with a drawn sword.

Inside, someone penciled your price: One dollar. Clearly you had been loved by others, maybe many others. Your pages were yellow. But I didn't care. We were drawn to each other. I started to read you in all the good places: front, back, Preface, everywhere. They call you Waterloo and you have an English author, John Naylor. Already you meant more to me than other paperbacks.

As I began to read you I no longer heard cries of "Does this cost too much?" and "This is too tight, right?" Just you and me, alone in the crowd.

You sounded a bit old-fashioned, in your over-educated, too-too English manner. Disclaimers you tossed off with nonchalance: "I have felt that the presence of source references in the text would only appear pretentious in a book with negligible claims to scholarship and none to original research."

After Preface followed Contents, Sources for Illustrations in Photogravure, List of Maps, and Chapter One: Preparations for War:

On the 4th of May, 1814, Napoleon landed on the Isle of Elba. Bidding farewell to the Imperial Guard at Fontainbleau a few weeks before, he had told them that henceforth he would devote himself to describing the great deeds he and they had accomplished together; within three days of his arrival on the island he had already made an exhaustive tour of inspection and drawn up plans of reform.

I had to possess you forever. I sauntered casually to the counter, and paid for pants and a lovely scarf. I also offered to pay for Waterloo.

I found this back there by that chair, I explained, and I'd like to buy it from you. Someone paid a dollar for it, maybe at Eureka Books just down the street. May I give you a dollar?

"No," she answered.

Oh, I said.

"You can just have it," she said. "It's been sitting around for a while, and I wondered if someone would come back for it. So just take it. For free."

Who says we don't value things we don't have to pay for? I treasure my Pan Books edition of Waterloo by John Naylor, part of the (long since completed) British Battles Series Illustrated.

She has the metallic smell sometimes noted in books with lightly tanned pages rusting from the iron included in cheap newsprint. Gently handled, she falls open at any page, not like those garish new books, stiff with foolish pride, that pose momentarily on best seller lists.

My Waterloo is a "rescue" book, like a cat that wanders in from nowhere and sits on your lap.

Waterloo lives again, if only on a crowded private bookshelf, in a small office, next to a forest threatened by wildfires. Safe for now. And loved.

Aired Sunday July 20, 2008 at 10:55 am and Wednesday July 23, 2008 at 1:00 pm

Orders/Information:

Waterloo by John Naylor. Pan Books (Great Britain) 1968 (first published 1960 by B. T. Batsford, Ltd.). Out of print paperback. No ISBN. Published in the US in 1968 (Macmillan hardcover and paperback).

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