What kind of a man wants toput the 10,000 most important books online by 2002 and make them available for free? (Hint: the kind of man who puts sugar on his pizza.)

I am sitting with Michael Hart at Garcia's, a pizza place near the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, where we are having a perfectly normal conversation about digital libraries and are preparing to tuck into our dinners. Hart is an e-text visionary and cofounder of Project Gutenberg, whose aim is to put copies of the world's greatest books on the Net for free. Hart is also a world-class eccentric with the social skills of a cranky 2-year-old. As I look up from my glistening pepperoni, Hart, who is 50, does the damnedest thing I've seen done to a pizza. Tearing open two dozen sugar packets, he sprinkles them methodically over his deep-dish pie until it is layered with white crystals. Then he digs in.

"This may seem weird to you," he confides between mouthfuls, "but it's the only way I can get enough fuel to keep working. This right here is 2,000 calories, and it should keep me going for a while."

Then the sugar begins coursing through his system, and Hart takes on the bug-eyed look of someone who has just hoovered up a few fat lines of Peruvian flake. The words tumble out. Sweat beads his upper lip. "Aaaah," he says, leaning back in the wooden booth. "I love working till I drop. I love looking back on the day and knowing I put another book online. That's what I'm here for. If I feel like I'm crashing, I eat. If that doesn't work, I sleep. I live by the nanosecond and burn the candle at both ends. With a blowtorch."

For more than a quarter century - eons, in Net time - Hart has made Project Gutenberg his mission in life. Or, more accurately, his fervid, manic obsession. While other geeks have grown rich mining the silicon motherlode, he's been sitting like a troglodyte in his Urbana basement, tending a utopian vision named for the 15th-century German printer whose amazing invention first made books accessible to the masses. As the 20th century wanes, Hart is using the Internet to try to finish what Johann Gutenberg started, pumping into cyberspace digitized copies of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Moby Dick, and Orlando Furioso and the works of Henry James, Plutarch, and Dostoyevsky - basically, any and everything that's ever been published between hard covers. It's one of civilization's oldest dreams: the universal library. And in an era of ever slicker Web graphics, blinking GIFs, and Java-powered billboards, he's doing it with militantly plain ASCII text files - just the words, please - downloadable anytime anywhere in the world by anyone with a functioning computer, a phone line, and a modem. No ads, no credit card numbers, no charge.

Even by the Net's generous standards, Hart is a wild romantic. He refuses to keep usage logs. He's not a big fan of copyright extension laws. He considers the Web an appalling waste of bandwidth - Gutenberg's main files reside on an FTP site. What passes for organization is a loose network of volunteer typists, scanners, editors, and proofreaders, plus a couple of pro bono attorneys, all held together by email. Other than that, Hart operates with something pretty close to no strings attached - political, institutional, or otherwise. Not that a lot of the groups that share his aims would have him.

Since Hart first typed the American Declaration of Independence into a U of I mainframe 26 years ago, Gutenberg has put about 1,000 titles online, on a budget smaller than some big-time electronic publishers allocate for market research. His self-imposed goal is to reach 10,000 books by the end of 2001, Gutenberg's 30th anniversary. And with 9,000 to go, the questions rise like the greasy steam from our pizzas: Is Hart a deluded crackpot, a high tech saint, or just another Net eccentric? And what is a project with seriously historic ramifications doing in the hands of someone who puts sugar on his pizza?

To find out, I'm pulling up outside the big, century-old, ivy-covered brick house that Hart bought years ago with a modest inheritance. In my honor, he's wearing slacks but quickly changes into the uniform he will sport for the rest of my three-day visit: black bicycle shorts that emphasize his pot belly, a red T-shirt, a baseball cap, and Nike Air Jordans two sizes too big that cost US$1 at a garage sale. Beneath the cap is short, thinning hair. He has a booming laugh and a large, clean-shaven fleshy face with graying sideburns. When I ask to use the bathroom, Hart gestures into the basement, past peeling plaster and ancient caulking. "Don't bother flushing," he hollers down. "I've got a garden hose, and I'll just run some water through it."