Chapter and Verse

According to Laysha Ward, Target vice president for community relations, her company's donations highlight early childhood reading in particular. "We are a major employer," Ward said, so growing an educated workforce is a big part of the idea.

The Washington Post is also a festival sponsor. It donated free advertising, and the staff of the Book World section helped out in a number of ways. After all, a newspaper without readers is a frightening thing.

· It's a community of writers and readers: This is what it's all about, in the end: a guy who gets into a line that's already 130 yards long. He's smoking a cigar, but he'll have finished it long before he can get McCullough to sign his copy of "1776." He's Clay Steward from Purcellville, Va., and he says he's read everything McCullough has written. Same with historian Joseph Ellis, whom he's hoping to get to see as well.

But isn't reading these guys enough? What is it about a few seconds of face-to-face contact that makes him brave these incredible lines?

"It makes them real," Steward says. "It takes them out of the stacks up at the Library of Congress and makes them a person, a human being."

James Mosberg is down from Baltimore on a similar mission. He and a friend are in line for Jonathan Safran Foer, whose novel "Everything Is Illuminated" he read in college.

Allison Levin of Arlington is nearing the head of an almost McCullough-length line -- for Diana Gabaldon, whose fiction she loves but cannot categorize. "Historical adventure slash romance slash time travel?" she ventures.

Back at the Poetry Pavilion, the Whitman crowd has thinned out some. Next up is Alice Fulton, who says she had to think hard before accepting her festival invitation.

She praises the protesters for speaking out.

She reads an antiwar poem called "Our Calling" that contains the lines: "It's our conspiracy to see / Iraqi Freedom / the world our way / the code name for the U.S. / empire by which we pledge / invasion."

But she also makes a point of thanking Laura Bush "for celebrating books today." It's important not to turn each other into monsters, the poet says.