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Aside from the weekly canteen, the book cart represents life's most important drama for Wake County's inmates -- 1,173 men and 137 women as of Monday.

Take a guess at the type of book that dominates the book cart. Science fiction? Poetry? Inspirational tales and religious texts? No. Not even crime novels.

Half the books on the cart are just like half the books published and purchased on planet Earth. They definitely qualify as "escapist literature," but they do not include "The Great Escape" by Paul Brickhill or "Papillon" by Henri Charrière.

They're romance novels.

That's right. The street-wise inmates of the Wake County jail are offered mostly "A Knight in Shining Armor" by Jude Deveraux and "Mr. Perfect" by Linda Howard, "Ravished" by Amanda Quick and "Carnal Innocence" by Nora Roberts and "Lord of Scoundrels" by Loretta Chase. (I myself enjoyed "Son of the Morning" and "Duncan's Bride," both by Linda Howard, plus "Sleeping Beauty" by Judith Ivory and "Family Man" by Jayne Ann Krentz.)

How is this possible?

Where books come from

All sorts of people drop off books at the jail, says Phyllis Stephens, spokeswoman for the sheriff. The biggest donor is the public library. When the library conducts its fall book sale, it invites detention chief Frank Gunter to come over and cherry-pick before the crowds descend.

"He tries very hard to select a wide variety of books," Stephens notes. Lately Gunter has been on a mission to increase the number of Spanish-language books, because 10 percent to 15 percent of inmates are Hispanic. Gunter does not have a fondness for romance novels, Stephens says.

So it must be regular citizens who are making the donations. Not surprising, when you think about it: Wake County is in the South, where people read more romances than in any other region of the United States.

What, I wondered, does Stephens think the effect might be on inmates from weeks or even months of romance-novel reading? Romance is a form of love, and love could be a deterrent to criminal behavior and recidivism.

On the other hand, parts of every romance novel, even the lousy ones, are meant to be racy. They're arousing. Does the sheriff really want a bunch of worked-up inmates in his jail?

"I try to avoid answering tongue-in-cheek questions," Stephens says. "So I think I'll leave that speculation up to you."

A last word on Thoreau the jailbird: He was falsely arrested and illegally imprisoned. A scholar in the '70s found that the Massachusetts law on the books in 1846 says a person who refuses to pay his taxes should suffer seizure and sale of his possessions, not arrest and incarceration, not even one night in jail.

Thoreau sought a simple life. He owned almost nothing. The cabin he built on Walden Pond, about a mile and a half from the village of Concord, Mass., was valued at $8, little more than the $1.50 poll tax he believed contributed to slavery and the Mexican-American War.

But Thoreau did have something the tax collector might have seized: a collection of books. One hundred forty of them.

Six months after I'd gotten out of jail, I ran into Nate. He said he had given up counterfeiting and started a pressure-washing business. He'd grown his hair out and gotten back with his girlfriend. He looked great. The next night I wrote him and asked if he'd read any books since we were bunkmates.

"Sadly, no," he wrote back.

"Me neither," I confessed.

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