SAVANNAH, Ga. -- Bookstores assign yards of shelving to tales of triumph over alcoholism and diabetes, obesity and stroke. Dwight Thomas has written a tale of triumph about his toenails.

"Leukemia had a best seller," said Mr. Thomas, author of "The War Against Toenail Fungus." In breathable sneakers, he stood one day at the writing table in a front room of his townhouse here. "Toenail fungus is ignored," he said. "It's extremely widespread. Nobody knows much about it, and you can't get rid of it. I leaped into the breach. This is a toenail-fungus patient memoir."

Toenail fungi, the same bugs that cause athlete's foot, squeeze under toenails and hide. They turn toenails yellow and crumbly. For reasons not well understood, they dig in deeper as people age. Now they're besieging the veterans of the fitness fad. Toenail fungus, in Mr. Thomas's words, is a "disgustingly earthy problem."

And one ripe for pharmacological exploitation. In America, according to Kalorama Information, a market-research publisher, 35 million people have it, and they spend around $1 billion a year trying to kill it.

Drugstores are full of toenail-fungus nostrums -- Mycocide, Miracle Anti-Fungal, Dr. Blaine's Tineacide. Many of the packages have toenail photos and fine print acknowledging the view of the Food and Drug Administration that toenail-protected fungi are beyond their reach. The Internet crawls with unsure cures: neem oil, emu oil, aloe sludge, vinegar baths, bleach, Vicks VapoRub.

"I have that ugly fungus on my big toenail," says a chat-room posting. "Thick, brown etc. I was told if I soak it in urine that it should be gone in a week. Any info as to whether this is valid?"

Not really. Only a few new and costly prescription drugs -- Lamisil and Penlac are two big ones -- have proven ability to penetrate a toenail. Mr. Thomas first learned of them six years ago on a visit to his dermatologist. It was on "a dull, dark, fateful day in January 1999," he writes, that the doctor "peered at my naked toes," looked up and said, "It's the fungus."

Fine-featured and 60 years old, Mr. Thomas belongs to one of Savannah's well-off founding families. He lives just across Monterey Square from the mansion where John Berendt set "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil." He never attended the fancy parties thrown there. As a note on his doorbell explains, Mr. Thomas, who has a doctorate in literature, sleeps twice a day -- at dawn and dusk -- and writes at his computer in the afternoons and in the wee hours.

His 1987 work, "The Poe Log," is a 919-page account of what Edgar Allen Poe did on every day of his life. He calls it "an act of fanaticism." Twelve years after his Poe book, Mr. Thomas began to get the itch to do a toe book.

Shuttling from his dermatologist to his podiatrist, he tried Lamisil. It worked; then the fungus came back. He tried Penlac. It worked; then the fungus came back. Months passed. One tiny vial of Penlac cost him $200. A Lamisil tablet -- one a day for 12 weeks -- cost over $8. Those cartoon bugs in Lamisil's ads got very annoying. And under the big toe of his left foot, the fungus stayed put.

Fed up, he took his toenails into his own hands. Tirelessly, he read the full corpus of fungal literature. Careful to avoid the potential side effect of liver damage, he devised a new regimen for himself, using Lamisil and Penlac at the same time. It worked: The fungus left and stayed gone. It was then, in empathy with millions of sufferers and co-dependents, that Mr. Thomas realized his journey of toenail discovery deserved a memoir.

He struck a military theme, aiming at the ungually fungal Vietnam generation, and two years ago turned out a 221-page volume replete with scientific citations. Sensing that big publishers wouldn't buy it, Mr. Thomas published the book himself, illustrated with his own battle-map drawings of his right big toe.

Soon, it hit home that marketing a fungus memoir could be harder than writing one, particularly for "somebody who's sort of removed." The toenail category had competitors: a slew of Web sites, one selling a downloadable book. There was only one print challenger, Mike Tecton's "How I Cured Deadly Toenail Fungus."

Mr. Tecton has written 89 other books, including "Tudor Wood Paneling," "Communist Causes of the Civil War," and "Enchanting Storybook Homes." Reached at home in McLean, Va., Mr. Tecton, 76, qualified his claim to have cured toenail fungus. "I actually got it back," he said. "I still have it."

In a wide-open field, Mr. Thomas might have promoted his book in Dr. Leonard's, the discount health catalog, alongside the bunion shields and toe separators. Instead, he ran a string of ads in the New Yorker magazine. Later, he switched to the Atlantic Monthly.

Mr. Thomas decided against a nail-salon book tour, perhaps wisely. At Sassy Nails in downtown Savannah, June Dang was shown a copy of his toenail book while she was manicuring Tammy Woods's fingernails one morning.

"Would you read a whole book on toe fungus?" asked Ms. Dang.

"Probably not," Ms. Woods replied. "I'd only purchase it if it had other-parts-of-the-body funguses as well."

Esther Shaver stocks local authors at her bookstore two blocks from Monterey Square. Mr. Thomas never gave her "The War Against Toenail Fungus." He hasn't shown the book to the local podiatrists and dermatologists he consulted. He hasn't sent it to Sanofi-Aventis SA, Penlac's maker, or Novartis AG, the maker of Lamisil. But Mr. Thomas feels he's done all he could to market a book on toenail fungus. And, it turns out, his double-drug solution might be right.

Without seeing it, no one at Sanofi-Aventis or Novartis could comment on the book. But Sanofi has independently come to the same idea. It has funded a large-scale clinical trial going far beyond Mr. Thomas's toes. Its lead researcher, dermatologist Abitya Gupta, expects results by 2007. He says the early data suggest that Lamisil and Penlac in concert are "indeed more effective than either drug alone."

Sales of "The War Against Toenail Fungus" have broken into the low thousands. Mr. Thomas has a new ad running in Harper's. Still, he has faced the fact that toenails don't make literary careers. His third book, almost done, is a history of research on breast cancer.

"What really sells a patient memoir is word of mouth," he said, seated among file boxes and athlete's-foot remedies in his writing room. "But this disease is not discussed at cocktail parties. Nobody discusses it at all." Mr. Thomas added: "Toenail fungus has no word-of-mouth potential."