A woman had given Neville's wife a book to pass along to him -- The Quest Everlasting, by an author he had never heard of, bought for a dime at a rummage sale -- and Neville tells his audience that after coming home from his last lecture, he read through some letters first, and then, once alone, picked up the book and could not put it down. He describes the book, a retelling of the Lancelot and Guinevere cycle, as full of lines worth driving straight into the mind.