Like democracy, the Internet is a great idea that was bound to screw up, because people are in charge of it.

On Monday I had 187 e-mail messages waiting for me at work ---- of which I wanted precisely three. The rest were come-ons for Viagra, Xanax, pornography and penis implants.

This makes me wonder: If I buy the Viagra, will I be able to do without the Xanax, pornography and penis implants?

If I buy the Xanax, could I do without Viagra, the implants and pornography?

And if I buy a new penis, can I throw away the Xanax and Viagra?

Pornography, like the poor, will always be with us. You'll take away our pornography when you pry it from our hot, sticky hands.

However, that's not the purpose of today's symposium. Today I want to talk about my favorite Internet site: http://www.bookfinder.com . Here you can find out-of-print books.

Type in the author or title and you get a list of all the used bookstores that have copies of it, the price, the condition the books are in ---- even whether there are coffee-cup stains on the cover. And it tells you the bookstore's address, e-mail and phone number.

There's no telling what you might find on Bookfinder. Recently I went on a William Allen White jag. White was editor of the old Emporia (Kansas) Gazette. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for his editorials against the Ku Klux Klan. In 1906, White wrote a collection of short stories called "In Our Town," describing life at a small-town newspaper. The book influenced Sherwood Anderson's great short-story collection, "Winesburg, Ohio," which came out in 1919.

I found a copy of "In Our Town" on Bookfinder and ordered it for $5. I received in the mail a first edition, signed by White, to "Mr. and Mrs. W.R. Stubbs, Dec. 25 '06."

Walter Roscoe Stubbs was governor of Kansas in 1906. So for $5 I got White's 97-year-old Christmas gift to the governor of Kansas.

I have an even cooler book a friend found in the garbage. The Riverside City Library was throwing out old books to make room on the shelves. Public libraries do that to books that have not been checked out in years.

This book, lying on top of hundreds of others in a Dumpster, is called "Immigration Crossroads," by Constantine Panunzio, 1927. I had just written a book on immigration and my friend thought I would like it.

It's a terrific book ---- a history of U.S. immigration policy, which is to say, a history of hypocrisy legislated by morons. Did you know that for
years immigrants could be barred from coming to the United States if they had an inferiority complex? That was the law.

In the final pages of the book, I found a yellowed slip of newspaper, dated Aug. 7, 1964 ---- the obituary notice for "UCLA emeritus professor of sociology Dr. Constantine Panunzio, 79."

This helped me make sense of the handwritten inscription inside the book's cover: "Lenore: Though we should never reach it, we stretch for the
star, my dear, and at each milestone we pause to drink in new vigor and forgetting all the toil that has been, go on .... 7/11/27 Constantine Panunzio."

The book in the garbage had been the author's gift to his wife. Seventy-some years after he gave it to her, years after they both had died, Professor Panunzio's book was destined for the Riverside County dump. I have it now.

It's hard to describe the feeling I get from that book. It took me 12 years to write a history of U.S. immigration prisons, and I know how much interest people have in the subject ---- less than none. I am one of about six people in the country who would even want that book, much less treasure it. But I do treasure it, even more than I treasure William Allen White's gift to the governor of Kansas.

There's something human about these old books, though they are just inanimate objects with crumbling pages. Everyone who ever was involved in the making of both books is long dead, but still, when I hold them in my hand, I feel something of humanity ---- traces of love and evidence of trouble.