My Parents' Library
Mar. 30th, 2011 10:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stoutfellowLying in bed last night, for some reason I began thinking about my parents' library. I remember a small cupboard in a hallway, filled with books. (That can only have been temporary; we moved so often, as my father was transferred from base to base. I don't know which place we lived that was.) Most of them were my mother's, but a few must have been dad's. There was a small but thick volume of Audubon's bird paintings, and a beautiful copy of Fitzgerald's translation of the Rubaiyat. (I still have that one.) I remember an autobiography (presumably ghost-written) of Rogers Hornsby, and a historical novel about Shane O'Neill. There was The Man of Iron, another novel, which I hazily remember as having been written by a relative. There were a couple of Frank Slaughter actioners - Epidemic!, which I read, and The Gelignite Gang, which I didn't. I thought Epidemic! was pretty good, but that was maybe forty years ago; what I'd think of it now, I have no idea. I think there were a couple of Saul Bellows: Herzog, maybe, and Mr. Sammler's Planet. I didn't read either one; I seem to recall thinking the latter was science fiction. There was Uncle Wiggily, which I loved as a child ("Katy did! Katy didn't!"), and the original of Bambi. (The movie had one heartbreaking scene; the book had several, including the sad fate of Bambi's friend Gobo. I also remember the scene in which the awestruck Bambi and Gobo saw the stags, and the closing scene, when Bambi himself became one of the stags.)
Elsewhere, there were our reference books. Our home (it seems in retrospect) was filled with encyclopedias: the American People's Encyclopedia, the Book of Knowledge, Encyclopedia Americana, World Book, later the Britannica, and the two-volume Columbia Desk Encyclopedia. There was The Dictionary: two enormous volumes, their pages including gorgeous color prints: butterflies, sea shells, flags of the world.... I spent many leisurely hours browsing in all of these, poring over tables of the common diseases of alfalfa, of the taxonomy of insects, of the chemical elements; reading my first poetry - "Ozymandias" and "This Too Shall Pass", as well as doggerel playing with the names of punctuation marks ("You'd be a jack * it"); looking at pictures comparing the distances to the planets and the nearest stars....
Gone, almost all of it. Gone too are most of the books I bought from the Science Fiction Book Club (I still have the first Science Fiction Hall of Fame, one volume of a two-volume Groff Conklin anthology, the Foundation Trilogy, and a handful of others). Withered leaves of my childhood....
:sigh:
Elsewhere, there were our reference books. Our home (it seems in retrospect) was filled with encyclopedias: the American People's Encyclopedia, the Book of Knowledge, Encyclopedia Americana, World Book, later the Britannica, and the two-volume Columbia Desk Encyclopedia. There was The Dictionary: two enormous volumes, their pages including gorgeous color prints: butterflies, sea shells, flags of the world.... I spent many leisurely hours browsing in all of these, poring over tables of the common diseases of alfalfa, of the taxonomy of insects, of the chemical elements; reading my first poetry - "Ozymandias" and "This Too Shall Pass", as well as doggerel playing with the names of punctuation marks ("You'd be a jack * it"); looking at pictures comparing the distances to the planets and the nearest stars....
Gone, almost all of it. Gone too are most of the books I bought from the Science Fiction Book Club (I still have the first Science Fiction Hall of Fame, one volume of a two-volume Groff Conklin anthology, the Foundation Trilogy, and a handful of others). Withered leaves of my childhood....
:sigh:
