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.
