Chapter and Verse

How can a book festival address this? Well, it connects readers with authors in a way that's "free, accessible and entertaining," Gioia said. It generates attention from the media, especially the electronic media. And it restores a social dimension to reading: "You go there and suddenly you say, my goodness, there's 85,000 other readers here."

It's too early to estimate this year's attendance -- but some of those readers started lining up at 9 a.m. for book-signings that wouldn't begin for hours.

· It's a nonpolitical event -- or is it? Laura Bush's participation in the festival would seem to make perfect sense. She's a former librarian, after all, who cares deeply about reading and literacy -- a politically neutral cause of the kind first ladies generally adopt. Who better to host the Friday night gala and the White House author's breakfast that kicked off the festival?

Except it has competition this year from the antiwar protest. The mingled book lovers and marchers mostly coexist peacefully, though one guy insists on shouting "books not bombs" as he walks by the readings. But the festival, while well attended, seems oddly secondary at times.

Poet Sharon Olds brought politics to the fore when she wrote a letter to Laura Bush that was recently posted on the Web site of the Nation magazine. In declining her invitation to the festival, Olds explained that she didn't want to be seen as condoning "the wild, highhanded actions of the Bush administration," which she described as a "regime of blood, wounds and fire."

Novelist Michael Chabon also declined his invitation. He said he opposes the war and considers the Bush presidency "illegitimate."

Children's book author and vice presidential spouse Lynne Cheney, meanwhile, dropped out for a totally nonpolitical reason: Her husband was having an operation to repair an aneurysm behind his knee.

· It's a television show: "Stand by to cue," the C-SPAN2 director says. "Is she ready for her cue? Five, four, three, two, one. . . ."

Half a dozen C-SPANners are squeezed into a bathroom-size control room in the trailer from which they're producing live book festival coverage. And now here's host Connie Doebele coming through bright and loud on the bank of monitors on the wall.

"We are standing outside the History and Biography tent," she begins.

Doebele is poised to interview Andrew Carroll, founder of the Legacy Project, which encourages Americans to preserve wartime correspondence. Inside the trailer, there's a problem, though: Producer Amy Roach's phone line is dead.

A flurry of activity. Another line is patched in.