I think I’ve shared before on LJ the tragic fate of my earliest books, which were devoured many years ago by some kind of bug (maybe a termite?) while stored at a family member’s house. All that remained of my Little Golden Books were their little golden spines. In time, I’ve tried to replace many of them (the books, not the spines) by shopping antique stores and vintage book sites. In fact, I found one today while looking for something else and ordered it. There’s one that I fear will always elude me, especially since I don’t know its title or author, only the pictures inside it, but I suppose part of the fun is in the search.
All these pictures can be clicked to enlarge.
According to my mother, I learned to read early, but except for the children’s books I actually owned, I don’t remember a single book from childhood. In fact, I didn’t see a Dr. Seuss book until I was already a teenager. I know I loved reading and was always in the bookmobile in summers, but I think I blocked out portions of my childhood because I was sick, and books became part of those disappeared memories.
I was nine when I began reading my first “real” books–that is, novels. Unlike an ex of mine, who read Moby Dick at around the same age (don’t be too impressed; his intellect peaked early–he dumped me, after all!), I went for more age-appropriate material when I discovered, in the library of my new school in South Carolina, Laura Ingalls Wilder. I also discovered I was only allowed to check out one book a week. One! Which I read the first night I got home, then had to wait a week for the next one.
This would NOT DO. My mother, always struggling with a tight budget, directed me to my brother’s and sister’s collections, where the Hardy boys and Walton boys (not to be confused with the TV family, who were actually Spencers in the book that brought them to life) and Nancy Drew and her pals were cavorting all over the bookshelves. I enjoyed them, but I didn’t want mysteries. I wanted more little houses on prairies, and Spin and Marty at camp learning to ride horses didn’t cut it.
At this point, a kindly family friend, a divorced man with no children of his own, took pity on me. Every few weeks when he went to Greenville on business, he stopped at a discount store (an early version of Wal-Mart) and picked up a Whitman’s Classic for me.
Oh, the joys of discovering the Marches and the Peppers and Heidi and Rebecca and her aunts and (the original) Tom and Becky and… Well, see for yourself. These never leave my possession, so no bugs had a chance to eat them.
I was like any addict, however. I needed more and more. So he finally enrolled me in a book club.
Just as the Whitman Classics fulfilled my need to graduate from the kids’ books I don’t remember, these (sometimes abridged) Readers Digest Best Loved Books for Young Readers, including Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, and The Great Impersonation, took my reading comprehension and enjoyment up another notch. By the time we moved to Alabama, I was ready for my mother’s bookshelves, reading everything from romantic suspense to literary giants.
I’m not sure if I’ve told this story before, but one time when I worked in the bookstore, a mother came up to me. She was frustrated because she kept buying her elementary school-age daughter books, but her daughter didn’t want to read them.
“What else can I do,” she pleaded, “to encourage her to read?”
“Do YOU read?” I asked. “Do you let her see you read?”
That idea had never occurred to her (she wasn’t a reader). I really was blessed to be born into a family of readers, because even if I can’t find the actual beginning of my love affair with books, I do know there’s nothing like walking with a troubled young bride across a misty moor, watching with Daisy as Gatsby throws expensive shirts on his bed, eating cold potatoes with the impoverished Pepper family, weeping over the loss of a beloved little sister, watching Neely O’Hara disintegrate, surviving a war with a green-eyed belle, trout fishing with Lady Brett’s chaps in Spain, and traveling the country with a dog named Charley.
Nothing feeds my soul like a book.
It’s really awesome that you still have those books! I don’t know what happened to all of mine. My dad really loved to read, and we were always going to the mall to go to the bookstore. It was usually a once a week trip, and some weeks we’d go to the library instead.
I miss the old library in Conroe. They moved to a bigger, fancier location. The old one was small, old, and cozy. I think I checked out every book on ghosts and supernatural stuff they had in the kids department.
The thing I’m most grateful for is that my dad taught me to love books. In high school I started taking Honors English classes because I wanted to be around more people that liked to read, but still ended up being too much of a bookworm for my classmates. Even working in a bookstore, I’m still too much of a bookworm for the people around me!
Bookworms are hot!
As for old libraries–I love the smell of them and being surrounded by all those books.
Bookmobiles– there’s a blast from the past. Remember the R.I.F. campaign?
I’ve never heard of The Great Impersonation and will shortly be spotted Googling (which sounds like a British dessert?).
Tender entry! I know the story of Eighty-Sixed but always want to hear more about it, first reactions, what it did to you, etc.
Thank you for making a powerful subject delightful and intriguing and inspiring– and very entertaining. : )
I totally forgot about RIF! It really is Fundamental!!!
Bookmobiles were the best.
Thank YOU for always being so nice to me. Well, at least on LJ.
I wonder if you still smell like shaving gel, heh heh.
Thank you Becky. LOVE Travels With Charley … and I think that the first time I ever read Call of The Wild was an abridged version of Call of The Wild from Readers Digest Collection, it made me want to read the UNABRIDGED version. It’s still one of my favorite books…
You’re welcome. I remember when I finally figured out what “abridged” meant, I got excited because I could then find the longer versions. It was like finding secrets in something I already loved.
only ONE book a week?!
crazy.
I know!
My mother is a big time reader, and my grandmother was too. I’m sure that’s were I picked it up from.
It’s great that you still have some of your old books. I have one of my first “tween” reads somewhere around here. If I can dig it up I’ll post a picture on my LJ.
I’ll look forward to it. Isn’t it great the way books are old friends?
Your taste in reading material sounds exactly like my sister’s! We had many of those same books in our house because she was four years older. Yet, instead, I would pass them by and hunt down the following topics:
1) horror and the supernatural
2) sex
3) anything about animals
4) comedy – the snarkier the better (MAD magazine!)
5) gothic trash – the more lurid the better (horror AND sex!)
6) an occasional classic title or historical romance from our large collection at home
I was a poor excuse for a girl, really. XD How some things never change.
Now, everyone in our home reads continuously and has mad language skillz — dad, mom, and big brother — but my daughter has almost no interest in reading outside of school assignments. Well, it’s not for lack of good examples.
As for me, right into college I had trouble forcing myself to do the schoolwork because my mind was burning with curiosity about some unrelated topic, or immersed in some other world in a novel. Hmm, that’s probably why I was never destined for academia in spite of excellent grades. 🙂
Your number five cracked me up.
What a wonderful atory!!!
Thanks, Gary. =)
I LOVE this post… it really makes me happy, and brings back a lot of memories about the books of my childhood. Thank you! 🙂
You’re welcome, and thanks for letting me know you enjoyed it. =)
Amazingly, I do not have any of my books from childhood though I had a multitude.
My doting aunties were always supplying me with Golden Books and my uncles passed on all their childhood books. For some reason I was the only nephew for five brothers who only produced female offspring. So I got all of the original Tom Swifts, Hardy Boys and other boy books of yesteryear. Strange thing, my mother only produced male offspring. So the books were handed down to my two brothers in turn. Whatever survived were passed on to my nephews.
So I have no surviving childhood books.
Also since my father got me a library card as soon as I could read, most of the books I read came from the library. And we didn’t have a Bookmobile. We walked to the library every week. Kids are really deprived these days.
So the only books on the top shelf of my book shelf were the collections I bought with my allowance — O’Henry, A. Conan Doyle, Ray Bradbury, Thorne Smith, Pelham Granville Wodehouse and all the other men and women of letters I’ve spent so much time with. Yes, that includes Becky and Timothy.
I wonder who may end up with my books one day…
Libraries are the best places. =)
My grandmother had a pile of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books
and no one else wanted them, so I used to walk off with one
every time I went over there. I remember reading all kinds
of stuff — “Shoes of the Fisherman,” “Nine Hours to Rama,”
some book about a leper colony that totally freaked me out,
memoirs, mysteries, historical novels (“The Queen’s Confession”
about Marie Antoinette!) — everything! There were three or
four to a volume and I read everything in them. Wow! Maybe
they weren’t all “classics” but they sure were good stories.
They also had that Reader’s Digest philosophy that you should
be interested in everything and read a mix of all kinds of
things. You don’t see that a lot today when everything is
so compartmentalized.
Just as an aside, one of my bandmates from way back grew
up in Virginia in Earl Hamner’s hometown and his mother
lived across the street from them when she was growing up.
She was always poo-pooing all the “Walton-worship”! “They
never owned a mountain! And they lived in town! Mrs. Hamner
was no hillbilly!” She’d get so incensed!
LOL, love the story about the Hamners’ neighbor!
As others have mentioned before me, this post is wonderful, just wonderful. It makes me smile and reminisce. Thank you for writing it and sharing it my dear.
You’re welcome, and I’m always glad when I can make you smile.
It’s so nice to re-visit old friends isn’t it? My collection, like yours, is wrapped, termite-free, in a trunk the attic, but I check them from time to time and then spend hours just re-capturing the memories of when I read them. My titles match up to yours pretty much, along with all the Anne of Green Gables series and everything Enid Blyton ever wrote!
I can’t remember learning to read – I think I came out of the womb knowing how to do so! Luckly my parents and the library were able to fuel my appetite (and we were allowed five books at a time!!) but I clearly remember my first day at school, being disgusted when given a book which had about 3 words on each page in large writing! This to a child who could already read a book in an evening, like you!
Books are special things, to be treasured and valued and I’m sorry for those who don’t pick up a book from one year’s end to the next . . . what joys of imagination they’re missing!
Thanks for this post; it was fascinating.
You’re welcome. Thank YOU for your comment. =)