My reading patterns were set early, by scarcity. I spent my few quarters on Grosset and Dunlap books: Tom Swift Jr., Hardy Boys, and Rick Brant. Rick Brant stood head and shoulders above the rest, having a real author rather than ghost writers. There will be more on him in another post.

On birthdays and Christmas, the other presents were appreciated, but the books were devoured. Before I discovered libraries, there were never enough books, so I read and re-read the ones I had. I still do. I would be embarassed to admit how many times I’ve read the Amber, Dorsai, and Lensman books.

My grade school class – all eight of us – was the last to haunt a building that had housed three hundred before my town shrank. We discovered a disused closet that still held the books that had been the library, and there I read my first book for adults, Thomas Costain’s The Black Rose.

The county library in Claremore was where my heart and soul lived, but I also had a dalliance with the library in Collinsville. It was an old, small, red brick building donated by Andrew Carnegie. If you have passed through small town America, you’ve probably seen one just like it. Carnegie libraries all look the same.

That was where I discoved one of the great secrets of life: libraries are time machines. I don’t mean that they have books on history. I mean that they never have enough money, so they never throw anything away. In Collinsville in the sixties, the shelves were full of books published during and before World War II. Not only were they about bygone days, the books themselves were actually, physically old. Hundreds of boys, too young to fight, had sat in that library reading the Dave Dawson war books that I now held in my hands.

The same actual books. Match that, ebooks!

So I learned to re-read and to treasure books from eras past. I still read John Buchan regularly, holding my nose at his imperialism and racism. And I can lip-synch Louis Lamore.

At home, there were plenty of my mother’s romance books. Occasionally I read a paragraph or two before nausea drove me away. Then, while digging through the books at home, I found one rare treasure, Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle, published in 1911. Yes, the taser book, although I couldn’t know that because this was long before tasers were invented.

My grandfather, who lived in Florida and whom I saw only once a year, had read this Tom Swift (Sr.) book fifty years earlier, and he was the one who sent me my first Tom Swift Jr. many years later.

Wow!