Paperback Reader

This is the last in a series of posts on childhood reading and the origins of my relationships with books, inspired by Larry McMurtry's reflections in his autobiographical Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen. Earlier posts are on the Book House books, Library Days , Hardy Boys and other Boy of Summers books, and how books came to be Books in Our House.

Books came into my life as hardbacks. (Even my Golden Books would qualify.) Without necessarily being conscious of these impressions, I learned to love the feel and heft, the quality of print and paper, the smell of the hardback book.

 But into my early teens, the cycle of the book experience was incomplete. I got to choose books from the public library, but I had to give them back. The books we got in the mail stayed on our shelves, but I mostly didn't select which books came into our house to stay. I couldn't buy a book at a bookstore because there weren't any. And they were too expensive anyway.

When I was in sixth and seventh grade, things began to change. I was sent to the Cathedral School on North Main Street in Greensburg, which meant I had more opportunities to be downtown. I also got my first paper routes, and though they were closer to home, I went frequently to the offices of the Greensburg Tribune-Review, which were also on North Main.

Paperboys didn't just deliver papers and collect the weekly fee (42 cents for 6 days.) We were also the newspaper's largest sales force. We were continually encouraged to get new subscriptions (or "starts") on our routes or anywhere. There were always contests and prizes, including trips (I earned my first train trip, to Chicago, this way.)

 So there were frequent meetings at the newspaper office, where we learned how to sell. (There were usually inducements for attending, like a free movie ticket.) I became such a fixture and favorite in the circulation department that one of the staff gave me her "start" so I could qualify for a trip.

 The combination of a little pocket money from the paper routes and my boy-about-town range of activity, especially downtown, meant that I was increasingly a customer for paperback books. They didn't need bookstores to sell them--they were on shelves and racks in the little confectioners and drug stories on and near my paper routes, and in various stores downtown.

 This in fact is how the modern paperback industry was born. For Greensburg was not unusual--lots of places didn't have a bookstore. The same was true in England where the Penguin line became the first paperback to prove the market for cheaply priced books sold almost anywhere, and set the example in the 1930s. American paperbacks followed soon afterward.

Drug stores and neighborhood stores might have a rack or two of paperbacks, but the actual paperback wonderland in Greensburg was located in the two newsstand/tobacco stores off of Main on Otterman Street, below the two movie theaters, the Manos and the Strand.

This photo from years earlier reflects my memory of the 50s:
on the corner to the left was the tobacco and news store with
racks of paperbacks. That it was a billiards parlor in this period
accounts for its size and shape.

Both stores were deep behind their storefronts but the larger was probably the tobacco store next door to the Manos. It was a forbidding place at first, with old men, some slightly disreputable. I may have been warned about it, because I don't remember going in when I first started trekking to the Saturday matinee movies at the Manos. 

I learned later that there was a reason for any reputation it might have. Along the inside wall that bordered a side street was a long row of telephone booths. They were well kept, as I recall, all in a single polished dark wood structure. There was a door to the street beside them. Directly across that side street was a bar, which at one time was the center of illegal numbers and other gambling for this side of the county. (The bar became famous among mystery fans for its frequent appearance in K.C. Constantine's "Rocksburg" series of police procedurals.) Not too much of a stretch to imagine that the phone booths were convenient for bookies.

 But aside from the tobacco counter along the other wall, with rows of newspapers and magazines, much of the rest of the space was taken up by rack after rack of paperback books. Getting up the courage to enter the place was one thing, but actually browsing the books was another. I wasn't entirely comfortable doing so until I was in high school. That was partly because a lot of those paperbacks would be classified as pulp fiction, or worse.

You get the idea

For shortly after the advent of paperback reprints came the paperback original, often genre fiction--westerns, science fiction, romance, war stories, mysteries, the occult and various combinations. These were mixed in with reprints of recent hardcover books and classic or at least older books, which is (as the subtitle to Louis Menand's New Yorker piece says) "how Emily Bronte met Mickey Spillane."

 Moreover, it was a bit tricky to distinguish the Brontes from the Spillanes because all the cover illustrations tended towards the lurid (Menand describes examples in this excellent review of paperback history.) A woman not entirely dressed was a common feature. None of which would have met the nuns' approval. (My mother would have simply called them vulgar.)

 At first my youth probably made the proprietors nervous. While not actually pornographic, a lot of their books--or their covers--could bring irate parental attention. I probably felt unwelcome, as well as daring the near occasion of sin, and suspicious eyes watched me.  But I risked it, to find books.

At least this scene is actually in
the book, sort of.

So it wasn't until I knew more of what I was looking for--titles, the names of authors or a particular subject matter--that I overcame my embarrassment for browsing among these covers, and undertook my searches. They pretty much were all jumbled together--there was no order by category in any of these places. But the price was certainly right: at a time when a regular comic book was a dime and the larger ones were a quarter, a paperback book was anywhere from 25 cents to 75 cents.

 Eventually I became a persistent searcher, and there were lots of places to look once my eyes were opened. That tobacco store was prime, and sometimes the newsstand a block or so down Otterman. (By the time I was high school age, the proprietors became indifferent to my presence.) But also drug stores, the bus station, and increasingly, the new supermarkets. They didn't often have those spinning racks but they did stock paperbacks in shelves below the magazines.

 It took a lot of spinning, staring, crouching, picking up, thumbing through, to find the gems. But they were there. It amazes me now that they were there.

 I know I bought paperbacks before eighth grade, but I don't remember any titles. They were probably few--my main source of reading outside school was still the public library. But a lot of the books I remember buying in eighth grade and high school I still have--often the very same paperback. They're the ones I took with me to college. Any others I left behind disappeared, one way or another.

I started in earnest in 1960 with an enthusiasm for the candidacy of Senator John F. Kennedy for President. I bought Profiles in Courage (for 35 cents) and a biography, John Kennedy: A Political Profile by historian James MacGregor Burns (50 cents.) I did some work for the local Citizens for Kennedy, and was given a larger paperback copy of Kennedy's Senate speeches, The Strategy of Peace. 

These were the first books it was important to me to have bought and to own. They were the beginning of at least partly conscious self-definition through books.

 When JFK was elected, I bought every related book I could find, including one called The Kennedy Government, which was basically a set of bios of his cabinet. (I could then--and still can--name every member of JFK's cabinet, just as I could--and can--name the starting lineup of the 1960 World Champion Pittsburgh Pirates. I can't do either for any other cabinet or team.)

 Later I got a book of JFK's speeches from his first two years (To Turn the Tide, fifty cents), and The Quiet Crisis (a big 95 cents in 1963) which is an early book on ecology by his Secretary of Interior Stewart Udall, still worth reading.

(I continued collecting Kennedy administration paperbacks in college, including Point of the Lance, a higher-price paperback about the first years of the Peace Corps by its first director, Sargent Shriver. When I met soon-to-be U.S. Senator Harris Wofford in the early 90s, we got to talking about the Peace Corps--he'd been one of its first officials. I thought I'd scored major points by remembering the title of this book about it, and even the color of the cover. But it turned out to bring back mixed memories, for he claimed that the actual uncredited author of that book was him.)

Through his interviews, Kennedy was a kind of tutor on the presidency for me, so I bought a book he recommended (and is still a recognized classic in political science), Presidential Power by Richard E. Neustadt (60 cents.) Later I bought Decision-Making in the White House by JFK's assistant and speechwriter Ted Sorensen. I found a similar kind of book but about the Eisenhower years: The Ordeal of Power by Emmet John Hughes (75 cents.)

 The early space program was part of the Kennedy excitement, though I would have been very interested in it anyway. So one of those early purchases was First Americans into Space, profiles of the Mercury astronauts by science fiction writer Robert Silverberg. My "Collector's Edition" (as it says on the cover) was 35 cents.

These were all interesting and a bit exciting, but they led to two books that made a big difference to me in high school, as my reading in public affairs areas increased with magazines etc. in connection with speech club and debate.

 One was The Other America by Michael Harrington, a startling analysis of poverty in America that surprised and enlightened a lot of people, including President Kennedy, who spoke highly of it. It's come to light since that JFK was going to make poverty his top domestic issue in the 1964 campaign, and LBJ's subsequent War on Poverty was in part a consequence, and a consequence of this book.

The other was The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin. I believe I came upon the book before I knew much about him--he was soon to be featured on the cover of one of the newsmagazines I was getting, as the Civil Rights movement was forcing questions about prejudices and racial injustice into public debate. The essays in that book, and in the earlier collection Nobody Knows My Name that I searched out (each cost 50 cents) were stunning and enlightening, the work of intelligence and artistry. They gave depth to my empathy as well as the recognition of immoral injustice, and were major contributors to my eagerness to participate in the March on Washington in 1963.

 There were other books around the house in those years that grabbed me and led me further on parallel paths, like the paperback of Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders that my father brought home, or the anthology of English literature I found in a trunk of books left behind by my uncle and aunt in my grandmother's attic. There were several poems of Shelley in there that became important to me at the time, especially his elegy on the death of John Keats, which I read several times as I struggled to come to terms with the assassination of President Kennedy.

And I explored more in the public library--I remember reading my first Sinclair Lewis, for instance. I also received hardback books as Christmas and birthday gifts (usually from my mother), like a volume of then-recent poems by Robert Frost, In the Clearing. But most of the books that defined me at that time, as I prepared for college, came from my paperback forays. I'd obviously become interested in politics, but I had always written. (It was a play I wrote about a political subject which won a national award and got me access to a couple of college scholarships.)

I loved comedy and satire, and had written it, from the third grade onward. I bought Mark It and Strike It by Steve Allen, I remember, and a couple of books that used real political photos but with cartoon-like captions. I still remember some of the jokes (Fidel Castro swinging a baseball bat with the caption: "Quick! Nationalize the outfield!")

 I also got a copy of The Thurber Carnival by James Thurber, which introduced me to a different kind of written comedy. I also read Thurber's book about his years knowing Harold Ross, editor of the New Yorker (The Years With Ross.) That made an impression, as I wondered about what a writing career was like.

I had a subscription to the New Yorker at some point, probably my senior year. (In fact I read Dwight MacDonald's long review of The Other America there.) Among other writers, it introduced me to the short stories of John Updike. I found two paperback collections--Pigeon Feathers (75 cents) and The Same Door (50 cents.)

 I devoured those stories, and this began decades of reading Updike. His writing about small towns and particularly adolescence (I especially liked the story "The Happiest I've Been") was important. Whatever other styles and attitudes I absorbed in later years, there was always a respectful place for Updike.

 It was then that I fell under the spell of J.D. Salinger. Perhaps it was through the New Yorker (for I remember the much later thrill of coming upon the last story he ever published, after years of silence, in an ordinary issue that had just come out, and I was reading on a bus or train station bench) or in some other way (like his Time Magazine cover). But it was major.

I searched all his books out--all available in these inexpensive paperback editions--and read them in a kind of holy frenzy: The Catcher in the Rye, Franny and Zooey, Raise High the Roofbeams, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction.

 Finally, the hardest one to find, Nine Stories. I have a vivid sensory memory of getting to the last story ("Teddy") and being too excited to sit still, so I started walking, and I read as I walked. I have that memory of reading "Teddy" as I walked quickly, blindly up Hamilton Avenue.

 Catcher in the Rye was intensely popular in my generation--most of my friends read it, and it was a point in common when meeting strangers (for instance, on debate trips.) That voice got into the heads of young writers, and was hard to shake. (I recall one story by a teen writer which was about precisely that.)

But I didn't know anyone else who had quite as seriously internalized Salinger's tales of the Glass family in his other books as I had. Though there was a lot of Christian imagery and message, these stories more or less introduced me to some ancient philosophy (I got a friend's sister to take out a volume of the Greek Stoic Epictetus from her college library for me) and especially to Eastern approaches. I'd pick up that thread in college and later with my interest in Zen and Buddhism.

 By the time I was off to college, I had some other paperbacks as well as a few hardbacks to take along. I had the pocket anthology of Robert Frost's poems. I had Conrad's Lord Jim, Thomas Hardy's Return of the Native and a few others. But mostly I was flying blind, with just these hints and indications.

I was going to college to enter a writing program, after nothing but ordinary English courses in high school, if Catholic school courses can be called ordinary. But I did find this one paperback: Writing Fiction by R.V. Cassill, which had two sections of instruction (The Mechanics of Fiction, the Concepts of Fiction), and between them a section of short stories by various authors, mostly contemporary (though also the first Chekhov short story I'd read.)

 One of those stories, and (apart from the Chekhov) the only one I remember was "The Best of Everything" by Richard Yates. Several years after I'd read it alone in my room in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, I met Richard Yates when he spent a few days at Knox College, where I was in a writing class. I told him how important that story had been to me, and how I had come to read it.

 He was astonished that I'd read Writing Fiction all on my own, just because I saw it and could afford to buy it.

 "Where did you find it?" he asked.

 I guess I was surprised at his surprise. "At the supermarket. Or maybe it was the tobacco store."

In more recent years I've come back to hardbacks, which when purchased used or remaindered are often cheaper than new paperbacks. With larger print and a reassuring permanence, they seem more comfortable at my age.

 But beginning with those high school years, paperbacks began to define "books" as I knew them--as I read and handled and bought them, and talked and wrote about them. That acceleration began in college, where assigned books for lit classes and other classes, and even many textbooks, were paperbacks.

 And my purchases in the college bookstore were overwhelmingly of paperbacks. My voracious forays into the bookstores of Chicago, Iowa City, Boulder, Berkeley, Cambridge, New York, Pittsburgh and--with the advent of mall chain bookstores--even Greensburg, were for paperbacks.

Paperback began to have a wider definition, with different sizes and quality (indeed, a category was born of the Quality Paperback.) But the classic paperbacks of 7x4 inches or so, remained central to my reading, and to my memories of books and authors: from Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Thoreau, D.H. Lawrence, Wallace Stevens, Vonnegut, Catch-22, Orwell, Donleavy, McLuhan etc. etc. in college, to Kerouac, Henry Miller, Burroughs, Mailer, Hemingway and onward to Marquez, DeLillo, Pynchon, McMurtry and back to Austen, Melville, Tolstoy, Conrad and over to Raymond Chandler, Ray Bradbury, Bester, etc.

 Larger paperbacks of James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Thoreau, Calvino, Beckett, Stoppard. Several volumes of James Wright and others in the Wesleyan poetry series. All of these summon specific sensory memories of those paperbacks, their context in time and place, their aura:

 Absorbed in paperbacks of A Separate Peace and, years later, The World According to Garp through long train trips. Reading Stendahl's The Red and the Black in line at the Cambridge unemployment office. Pound's ABCs of Reading on a bus. Dorothea Brande's Becoming A Writer on a plane. Calvino's Cosmiccomics at the coffee shop. Long nights with Pynchon's Against the Day. For example.

(Not to mention McMurtry's All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers.I spotted a paperback of it one Sunday afternoon in the Boston apartment of a young woman I had mixed feelings about.  I never saw her again, but I got the book and read it several times in succession.  It was astonishing, even if I started out slightly annoyed that the title was close to one I had designated for my own use.)

There was a romance to the plain cover editions of Balzac etc. that Antoine Doinel read in various Truffaut films, and to the original plain cover Penguin editions. These covers said that good books (however funny they might be) are deadly serious things, and they don't need garish introduction. The paperback said they aren't for only the rich. Together they also and especially said: this reader is serious.

 A popular paperback like Catch-22 could be identified from a distance, its blue cover showing on a coffee shop counter, peeping up from a back pocket, indicating a definite cache. The books you carried defined you, and occasionally, the books you read. They informed your forming soul.

 And so this journey continues, as it began in the public library, the living room, the drugstores and newsstands, the building blocks of this lifetime house of books.

Books in Our House

Looking north on Greensburg's South Main Street in the 1950s--
the view I would have had just after leaving the public library.

When I was growing up just beyond the city limits of Greensburg, PA, its Main Street and the two parallel blocks on either side of it constituted the commercial center of the town and the surrounding township, and in some ways of the entire county.

 The two most prominent destinations of my downtown world were near either end of this district: the two movie theaters to the north, the public library at its southern edge. Between them were three department stores, plus a J.C. Penney and a Sears. There were a number of specialty shops, for womens' fashions, shoe stores, men's suits, and Joe Workman's for work clothes and bargains.

 There were two "five and tens," both large and with their signature red signs and bare wooden floors. During a particular period, I got my model airplane kits in Murphy's basement, $1.01 with tax.

a little farther north on S. Main in the 1940s. The
trolleys ran until the early 50s. That's a bit of the
Murphy's red sign on the right, with McCroys'
across the street in shadow.

 Both Murphy's and the other 5&10, McCroy's, which were across Main Street from each other, had a lunch counter and soda fountain. Sometimes they strung balloons above the counter and a slip of paper inside each one told you how much you would pay for your banana split.

Several drug stores also had lunch counters and tables or booths, with those little juke box machines at each. There were other restaurants, quite large ones like Lee's, but other smaller places, more like diners, some of them with entrances below street level.

 There was an Isaly's with a meat counter but also lots of ice cream, including their skyscraper cones, and of course, their now famous Klondikes.

 There was a camera store, a record store, and a store selling Singer sewing machines. What there were not were bookstores. The shop selling Catholic items had some books, and maybe one of the department stores. But basically there were no hardback books on sale on Main Street, or anywhere in Greensburg, or anywhere I knew of.

 Neither of my parents attended college. When they were married, the US Census described them as factory workers (they met in a war plant.) Soon afterwards my father went to work at that Singer store on South Main Street (its phone number was 409), and my mother was a 1950s homemaker until I was 12 or so, when she worked the night shift in billing at the Westmoreland County Hospital, and over the next decades worked her way up into management.

 Greensburg had its rich people, some of whom were probably well educated, and it had a professional class. But most were like my parents, in the working middle class, with no more than a high school diploma. And the culture was pervasively working class and very local. I can't remember ever seeing books on display in any of the homes I visited in my childhood. There wasn't much of a market for bookstores.

Me at 18 months, almost certainly in our first home,
an apartment on the top floor on College Ave.

The only exception I saw was our home, where there were always books. Here's a photo I'm pretty sure was taken in my first residence, an apartment on the top floor on College Avenue. I'm not yet two years old.

A bit later we moved into what everyone called "the foundation." It would be the basement of our house, once the house was built on it. In our neighborhood at least, many families lived in the foundation while they saved for the house. There are photos of my parents and some relatives there, that show the painted concrete block walls, and again, a small shelf of books.

 Eventually the house built above it would have bookshelves in the living room. My mother expanded this area several times. There were bookshelves in my room, and after I left, the room became a den with the upper half of a wall of books.

 Where did these books come from? (Apart from the little books for me, which I always had, and school books, etc.) Some seemed always to be there, especially the reference books. I still have the thick Collier's yearbooks for 1946 and 1947 that must have come with a set of Collier's encyclopedias. (Later I was given my own set of new encyclopedias. They were relatively thin volumes, blue like the Americana, but "modern" with illustrations, and probably geared to younger readers. I used them for schoolwork.)

 There were of course the Book House books.  Of the books in that photo above I recognize only one set of volumes--their covers were a very distinct green--and I think they were novels by classic authors. There was a book on Abraham Lincoln--I can almost see the dust cover, and it may have been a collection of three books in one volume, but I can't remember anything else about it.

And there were probably a few old text books or required reading, as my mother's sister and brother had gone to college (my grandfather always was saddened about not being able to afford to send my mother, the first-born.) My schoolbooks were mostly hardbacks, but they went back to the school at the end of the year. Probably the most influential such books were volumes on astronomy and science I found on the shelves at the back of my fifth grade classroom when I sat at the last seat in the row. I read them instead of paying attention to math.

There was a big old dictionary at home, with thumb indexes and a ribbon bookmark, like the big missal the priest used at the altar during Mass. It could be my sense of words as holy came partly from this.

But as for other hardback books, there were chiefly two sources. One was the book clubs, namely the Book of the Month Club and the Literary Guild. These were advertised in magazines and Sunday supplements. Usually you got several books for very little when you joined. By joining you agreed to buy a certain number of books a year. They sent you a brochure describing their next monthly main selection, and if they didn't hear back by a certain date, they would send it. Their monthly brochure also offered other books as substitutes.

I believe we belonged to both clubs at different times. You could join, fulfill your obligation and stop, then later start a new membership and get that introductory batch of books for a buck each. By the time I was in high school, I lobbied my mother to join the Literary Guild so I could get H.G. Wells two volume Outline of History as one of the introductory selections. Eventually we got their special editions of several novels by Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

 I don't however remember specific books before that. My mother got some new novels, like Marjorie Morningstar. She had a biography of Dwight Eisenhower before his presidency that I read. I recall only two others, that interested me for different reasons. One was a collection of single-panel cartoons, many from the New Yorker, that I pored over for hours. That kind of wit was new to me.

The other was a collection of columns by war correspondent Ernie Pyle, a very popular columnist through the 30s and 40s, called Here Is Your War. On the inside flyleaf my mother had recorded the date that he had died, during one of the last battles of World War II, on Okinawa. That notation puzzled me, so I asked her if she'd known him, but she hadn't. Still, it's why I remember it.


 The other chief source of hardback books in our house was the Readers Digest Condensed Books, and I remember quite a few of those. These were thick volumes that came four times a year, each with condensed (or abridged) versions of four or five new books, usually fiction but not always. Apart from excerpts in the many magazines we got, they were the only way a home like ours was apt to get even that much of the new hardbacks.

These were substantial abridgements, though I'm sure they emphasized plot. They were usually by best-selling popular authors, not literary giants, though there were some outstanding writers among them, and they did occasionally include classic authors like Dickens.

 The first titles I remember are from 1955, though that isn't to say I actually read them then. Those books stayed on the shelves that I examined often, so I could have read them years afterwards. From the 1955 volumes, I probably read (or tried to read) Good Morning, Miss Dove,a novel about a teacher, and The Day Lincoln Was Shot by Jim Bishop, a popular historian and journalist. Two I'm certain I read were Run Silent, Run Deep, a novel about submarines, and The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, the novel upon which the musical Damn Yankees! was based.

 I started it because it was about baseball, and I actually liked the Yankees. But I vividly remember the passages about the middle aged narrator physically becoming the young ball player, feeling himself able to run. I ran all the time, and it hadn't yet occurred to me there might be a time when I no longer could. It was my introduction to how physical aging might feel. (I also was a bit scandalized and scared by the devil aspect of it, being in Catholic school at the time. For all I knew it was a forbidden book. Certainly that "Damn" was suspect.)

As mediocre as much of this probably was, I was alert to things I didn't know from my oddly sheltered life. We obviously had no Jews in Catholic school, but I caught some connections and some differences in immigrant cultures from a novel called Seidman and Son in which a character is a tailor, like my grandfather.

 When I read Advise and Consent, homosexuality was such a forbidden topic that the subplot which involved a gay dalliance was so obscurely suggested that I couldn't figure it out, for I knew nothing whatever about homosexuality anyway. Still, that was my favorite novel for awhile because it involved the U.S. Senate and a world of government I was getting keenly interested in.

 By then--1959--I was catching up, reading the latest Condensed Books volume when it arrived. Besides Advise and Consent, I also read The Ugly American that year. Political fiction and nonfiction were becoming a popular trend, just as I started becoming interested in it.

These abridgements made it possible for me to read a book before it became a movie, whereas it had always been the reverse before. (Disney in particular sent me to books, from the Hardy Boys to Johnny Tremain.)  In particular I read To Kill A Mockingbird before I saw the movie, and so could compare the images in my mind (influenced by the illustrations) with the actors on the screen.  I entered into it completely.

 From these condensed books I got an overly romantic view of writing from Youngblood Hawke, and an overly romantic view of science from The Microbe Hunters. I also went on from these abridged versions to eventually read the entire book, in particular Theodore White's The Making of the President 1960 and John Steinbeck's The Winter of Our Discontent. That Steinbeck novel also sent me to read several of his shorter novels in a single volume my mother had, probably from a book club. (And I could have sworn I read Travels with Charley as a RD condensed book. But I must have gotten it from the library shortly after it came out.)

 We did get a lot of magazines--my mother got all the women's glossies (McCalls, Redbook, Ladies Home Journal), my father got Popular Science and Popular Mechanics (I knew all about the Edsel before it came out), and we usually had Life, Look and the Saturday Evening Post, and of course, Reader's Digest.

 By the time I was in speech club in high school, it was an overflow--the weekly news magazines, plus the New Republic, the Nation, the Reporter, American Scholar etc. But I mention them in this context because they often referred to the latest books and authors. Apart from what I could guess from context, I had the condensed books to place me in this ongoing stream of contemporary references, especially with topical books like Seven Days in May.

As I've mentioned in an earlier post or two of this series, and as must be obvious from this one, I was not a particularly precocious reader. I wasn't, like Katherine Anne Porter, memorizing Shakespeare's Sonnets at age 13. No, these were gateway drugs, as were the Classics Illustrated Comics I bought, that introduced me to Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon and the original H.G. Wells The Time Machine before the movie and The War of the Worlds after it, both very different versions--something else I learned.

 By the time I was in college I learned to denigrate such abominations as abridgements and "condensed" books of novels that were too bad to begin with. My mother's bookshelves would be a middle class embarrassment. I'm not embarrassed anymore. There's no point in wishing I had a better education. In some ways it's a miracle I had any experience of books and book culture. All I can do is record the means, and frankly, remember them fondly.

This is one of a series of posts on childhood reading and the origins of my relationships with books, inspired by Larry McMurtry's reflections in his autobiographical Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen. Earlier posts are on the Book House books, Library Days and the Hardy Boys. and the Boy of Summers.