It’s not for her personally, it’s for the used book store she manages, the Second Chance Book Nook. It keeps running out of space for more books.

In a roundabout way It would be for me, because when my wife has no other place to store donated books they end up in our barn. In the east half of the barn there are pathways, corridors, through stacked boxes of books, books from estate sales, yard sales, liquidated school libraries. Book store customers bring boxes of books and leave with boxes of books, like pack rats.

“There’s a building on Fifth Steet. It’s only $250,000,” Honey informed me. “Maybe someone will buy it for me. You could write about it in your column.”

“I can’t do that,” I said. “It’s unethical.”

But the ethics of a columnist are iffy, so here I am writing about it. Mr. or Ms. Moneybags, buy a building for my wife. Please. As Henny Youngman would say.

I’ve tried to discourage her, arguing that whatever difficulties she has now with running out of space and being too hot in summer and cold in winter would only be replaced with different and larger problems: paying the upkeep and utilities on an old building, recruiting more volunteers to staff it, moving all those books and bookshelves. Just the thought makes my back ache.

The store she has now is a busy, overstocked, happy place, with a lovely staff of mostly older ladies (and two gentlemen, not to forget the gentlemen) who give their time because they love books. They love getting books into the hands of other people who love books, real books, not digital Kindles, books whose pages you can dog-ear, books you can fall asleep with, that you can pass along to a friend, books that smell like books, books lovingly inscribed to people you don’t know, books with the best parts underlined and complaints written in the margins.

Books with weird surprises. I found a hair salon appointment reminder card, apparently left as a bookmark, in a local history book that Honey brought home for me a few days ago. The appointment date was my birthday in 2007.

Is Somebody Out There sending me a message? If so, can you make it a little plainer?

Children come in and gleefully gather up books like grabbing sweets in a candy store. Homeschoolers and their moms depend on finding textbooks, instructional help, classic literature. Homeless people are given a book when they stop in for food. Old people love the book store. Teens love the book store. Everybody loves the book store.

The Book Nook will never generate enough revenue to buy a building, not by selling hardbacks for a dollar, softbacks for 50 cents and children’s books for 25 cents. The managers of The Way Station, the Christian charity nonprofit under which the Second Chance Book Nook operates, seem happy with the few thousand dollars it brings in annually, helping with food distribution and other good works for the needy. Promoting literacy is a nice side effect.

On the other hand, they probably wouldn’t mind not having my wife always asking for more: more warehouse space, a dropped ceiling in the backroom stacks because it’s freezing in the winter, better air conditioning in the front before somebody passes out from the heat this summer.

Suppose she does get her new (old) building. She’ll fill it up with books, and then what?

Back in the Book Nook’s early days I innocently asked my wife, “Do you think book donations will ever dry up?” What a silly question that turned out to be.

Every month she loads her SUV to the roof with books for the recycling mill in Toronto, Ohio: encyclopedias, dictionaries, outdated how-to-do-whatever books, books a bit too racy for a Christian-affiliated store. Sorry, ladies, the bodice-rippers go to the pulp mill. Whatever space is created by recycling quickly fills up again.

Honey told me the other day about a regular customer who was going on and on about what a happy place the Second Chance Book Nook is, how just coming in the door makes her happy. Truth is, it makes my wife happy, despite the time and work required, and it makes the friends she has recruited as volunteers happy. I’m happy, too. I would have to live another lifetime to read all the amazing books that she finds for to me.

On second thought, Mr. or Ms. Moneybags, don’t buy my wife a building. Please. But if you want to give enough for that dropped ceiling or a bigger air conditioner, nobody’s going to turn you down.