National Library Week is coming, and I want to know your fantasies. No, not that kind—the real ones, the important ones. The fantasy of the absolute, ultimate, perfect ideal of a library.

It can be a public library or your personal space, large or small, vast or intimate, dim or bright, wood or glass—this is your library to build, yours to stock, yours to revel in. The only thing you don’t have to do with it is pay for it.

Tell me what it would look, feel, smell like. Does it have a coffee machine—an espresso maker, perhaps? A café with Internet connection? Or the very opposite, wood walls and carpeted floors with the most modern piece of equipment a well-annotated card catalogue (remember those?)

You can write your description, or you can draw it. Make me a floor plan, or put together a collage of colors and shapes that capture the personality of the place. Tell me where it is—city center or on its own spot of land? Who is there—you and maybe another, or a thousand (well-behaved!) schoolchildren falling in love with books?

Tell me. You can send your words or pictures to bees@laurierking.com, or mail them to me at P.O. Box 1152, Freedom, CA, 95019. Either way, you have until Friday, April 9 to come up with your vision of the perfect library.

And at the end, if I fall in love with your ideal, I’ll give you two pieces of literary art for its walls—“Birth of a Green Man” and the small version of “A Venomous Death.” And then I’ll take a box and load it with one of every Laurie R. King novel written and I’ll send those books to whichever actual, mortar-and-brick (or wood-and-paint) public library you choose. Assuming they want the books, of course.

This is all by way of celebrating National Library Week, which begins April 12th.

Because Laurie Loves Libraries.

And now, we return you to your regularly scheduled program.