The
following is based on a lecture delivered at the Kerlan
Collection of Children’s Literature at the University of
Minnesota in the summer of 1995. I had been asked to speak
about juveniles and children’s literature, a subject
about which I know little. Pressed for an appropriate topic,
I spoke instead on the books I experienced as a child and
adolescent, my personal children’s literature.
As a child I did not think of books in the
same way as I think of them today. Books then were no more or
less important to me than, say, the bathtub. I can recall
neither my first encounter with a book, nor a significant
moment in which a book played a part. I was enamoured of no
specific character or story. The books were just there, in
quantity, and they became part of my consciousness, if not my
every-day life. What more could I have made of them at such
an early age? I recognized the basic physical features. I saw
that they lined the walls. I took them for granted.
I have only sparse recollections of my
parents’ reading to me, and those stand out, not for the
words or the illustrations, but for the setting: an ample,
well-cushioned window-seat, second floor, high under the
canopy of a gigantic copper beach, pleasant enough for
reading, and sublime for daydreaming. I have an early,
isolated memory of my mother showing me crossword puzzles up
there, the salty breeze blowing in from Narragansett Bay. She
was working a spiral-bound book of puzzles, edited, no doubt,
by Margaret Farrar of the Times. Puzzle books and quiz
books were ubiquitous in my family, and we were always
challenging one another with trivia and riddles.
At the beginning of one of my early years
in school I remember a questionnaire that I brought home from
school—maybe third or fourth grade—one question of
which was this: How many books are in your home? a) none; b)
1-10; c) 10-25; d) over 25. This question boggled me. I grew
up in a house with a thousand books at least, and there were
almost that many again next door, at grandmother’s. What
wasn’t on the shelves was stacked in store-rooms, or
later, as the quantities grew, in boxes in the basement.
Didn’t everybody have a thousand books?
The cellars of grandmothers the world over
contain much that is both mysterious and instructive to
grandchildren, and my grandmother’s cellar was no
different. She lived alone next door for as long as I knew
her, which was twenty-five years, in a large Victorian house
with thirty-odd rooms on five and a half levels. The two
special places for me in this majestic building, places I
planted my flag and claimed as my own, were the one-room
aerie at the top of a tower on the fourth and a half floor;
and a dark, cavernous, magical basement. Time and time again,
I was sucked down its cool granite halls, drawn by the dark
and the dank, drawn by shadow toward the coal shoot and bin,
the blackest and most foreboding corner still heaped with a
crusty mound of coal. Far back in a distant recess, behind a
squat stand of steamer trunks, along a dirty outside wall,
were three large book cases filled with books, each case
about three feet long, and each with perhaps five or six
shelves. More books were stacked between them on the floor,
and more still were mixed in with old blankets in the trunks.
What made these books special to me, and
what made them my books in the end, was their state of decay.
All were water-damaged. On some, mold had set in, and on
others, vermin had nipped the corners. Lots of dead bugs were
scattered about them, and sheets of dust and mortar had
settled over their top edges. With bookseller eyes I see them
now as never important books, rather secondary and tertiary
literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
mixed in with some local history. It was strange to me that
even though they were damaged and consigned to perdition in
this basement, no one could bring themselves to throw them
out, as if someone were saving them just for me. I came to
covet, in those youthful hours, those moldy books, many of
whose pages could not be turned without them tearing off in
my hands.
What a find for me! Those books in
grandmother’s cellar fascinated me in a way those that
were read to me, or those I was told read, did not. I never
once "read" a book that came from
grandmother’s basement. But I paged through a lot of
them, and it was here, in this dim alcove that I perhaps
first grasped not what a book was—for I had gotten that
much from reading Dr. Seuss—but rather, what a book
could be: a mystery to be fathomed, very much like the
basement itself, foreboding and comforting at the same time.
It was on these shelves that I first encountered the names of
Longfellow and Holmes, Higginson and Stowe. I distinctly
remember The Memoirs of U.S. Grant, and there was a
long run of Harper’s Magazine, to which I
returned years later in my early career as a bookseller, to
extract volume V, containing the October, 1851 issue in which
was printed a contribution by Herman Melville used by
Harper’s as a promo for Moby Dick.
I’d like to think of this as the first book I scouted.
What now seems remarkable about my
fascination for these books in grandmother’s basement is
that in my own home next door there were two tons of books at
least, not damaged, readily accessible, and with good light
to read by. I can only guess why I ignored these books early
on. Perhaps they were too much an extension of my
parents’ personal world for me to grasp, while the books
in the bowels of grandmother’s cellar were too easily
accessible to a curious and adventurous little kid, rummaging
to his heat’s content, not to take for all they were
worth.
When I was ten or eleven my father had new
bookcases built in the library. There were two banks of
shelves, with glass doors above and cabinets beneath, and the
shelves were lit by soft gray florescent lights up and down
the sides, so that at night, with all the other lights out,
the books radiated and glowed like something primordial.
In my parents’ bedroom were my
mother’s novels, mostly current or recent fiction,
including, as I remember, a lot of Graham Greene, Hemingway
and Aldous Huxley, and a thick paperback whose spine I can
see still, the chilling silhouettes of two distinctly-clad
figures, Stendahl’s The Red and the Black. Simple
words, that title, so I remembered it. There was also Agatha
Christie and Alastair McLean—authors I ploughed through
in my late teens—and my father’s Perry Masons,
which I never touched.
There was another title I remember from
those shelves in my parents’ room, the one incongruity
among the modern novels and thrillers: Sir Martin
Conway’s The First Crossing of Spitzbergen, which
contained, I discovered, my other grandmother’s
bookplate. I remember having it down off the shelf once when
the cloth spine suddenly separated from the rest of the
binding. I quickly put it back on the shelf, and tried to
position the spine in a way so as to conceal the damage, but
to no avail. I decided to hide the evidence and took the book
with me to my room, and I shoved it behind others on my own
shelves. This book is still on my shelf at home today. The
spine is still off and you can easily spot the book from
across the room for the elastic bands that hold it on.
In the hall, just outside my own bedroom
were more modern novels and historical works: John Masefield
was here, as was George Moore, John Galsworthy, and Henry
Adams, and the collected works of the nineteenth-century
historian John Fiske. I walked past these books—hundreds
of them—day in, day out. Occasionally I looked at them,
on rainy days, or to escape the babysitters. Once I counted
them for no particular reason, except perhaps in response to
that school questionnaire.
In my own bedroom there were bookcases on
the east and north walls, and these were lined with books on
sports (mostly baseball, but football was making inroads) and
Ripley’s Believe It or Nots that I
snitched from my parents’ shelves—an early sign of
the bibliomania. There were also the Mad Magazine paperbacks that I still have in a carton in the furthest
recesses of my bathroom closet, some 30 or 40 of them. I was
a subscriber to Mad, and the magazine and the books
they published played a big part in my negotiating
adolescence. I doubt I’ll ever sell them.
My grandmother would not have approved of Mad,
had she only known. To have her own sway, she subscribed me
to every Time-Life series going, and there were plenty in the
early sixties: Nature Series, Science Series, Travel Series.
These were on my shelves in abundance, neatly shelved in
chronological order. The best of the lot was the Historical
Series, which only lasted six issues or so, or at least
that’s all I ever received, and I’m sure it was the
publishers, and not my grandmother, who stopped the
subscription. The Historical Series had all kinds of great
pictures of the American West, bear hunts, and steamboats,
gunslingers and illustrations of old political broadsides
printed in bold wooden types. I was fascinated by these.
Equally fascinating for me was American Heritage magazine, with lavish color reproductions of Currier &
Ives lithographs of trains steaming across the continent, or
firefighters battling raging blazes in the heart of Harlem. I
still own the set I grew up with, and when I went back to
sort through them about seven or eight years ago, I remember
how soiled and worn the early volumes were—evidence of
so many late nights paging through them. American Heritage is a scorned set now, for it is a long and cumbersome set in
its complete state, common and unsaleable; but in my opinion,
no household with children should be without them. I was also
subscribed to Horizon magazine, which was oriented
towards the fine arts, but these didn’t appeal to an
adolescent boy so much as the whaling scenes of stove
longboats and spoutings of the agonized, bloody whale.
My mother must have worried about the blood
and gore because books started turning up in my room that I
wouldn’t have wanted ordinarily, like Jean Kerr’s Please
Don’t Eat the Daisies; and Watson and Crick’s The
Double Helix. On the other hand, Hemingway’s Death
in the Afternoon, with its illustrations of the
bullfight, mysteriously disappeared.
In time, all these books satisfied and
enriched; gradually, I began to notice the books at home,
especially those behind the glass doors in the room we called
the library, our living room. Here was my father’s
collection of New England authors, and selected highspots in
any number of fields, many of which had passed on to him from
his mother (the other grandmother), a woman I never knew,
though herself a noted collector of books and antiques in
Baltimore in the thirties and forties. Many others had been
collected by my father in his early days, as a student at
Brown University.
Occasionally my father would take down a
volume and show it to me, gingerly opening the book to the
title-page and illustrations, as if the pages themselves were
made of gold. I remember the thick, stout copy of the
American edition of Moby Dick; I remember the
brilliant color plates in Audubon’s eight-volume Birds
of America; Thackeray’s Vanity Fair in its
original bright yellow monthly parts; I remember the
fore-edge painting of a fishing scene; I remember the bright
green and gilt pictorial cloth binding on the first edition
of Huck Finn. Oddly, I don’t have any early
memories of the best part of the collection, that which
pertained to Henry David Thoreau, the author with whom, in
the end, I most closely identified my father. Perhaps he
thought of these as his most private books, and that by
showing them to me, some connection he had with them would be
broken. His collection of Thoreau, I learned later, was very
good, with fine first editions in slipcases of Walden and A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers, the
latter with pencil corrections in the text by Thoreau, and
there was a long run of various editions of Walden,
including many foreign ones, as well as family and
association copies. He also owned, incredibly enough, two
pages of the Walden manuscript. Such touchstones of
literary history within inches of my grubby, inexperienced
hands! But what could I, a boy of twelve or thirteen, know of
these?
What I did know was that opening the glass
doors to my father’s books was a nuisance; it meant
moving chairs and lamps, which I’m now certain were
strategically placed. So I was drawn for practical reasons to
the other end of the library where there were three or four
floor-to-ceiling sections of family books, for want of a
better term—books that somehow belonged to everybody and
anybody. On the east wall were nautical and yachting books
(our other family passion was boats), including two or three
my father had written and published himself. On the south
wall was a section of travel books, Michelin and Baedeker
guides, books my parents had purchased or had been given as
presents before, during, or after their wanderings, and
another section on the art and antiquities of the countries
they visited. On the west wall was a small section of
architecture—coffee table books with stunning black and
white photographs of colonial and Georgian houses, and others
with color photographs of castles and villas, plus a shelf or
two of books about furniture, some of which pictured—my
mother made sure I knew—pieces that were in the next
room.
The two books my father wrote, about
cruising in the Mediterranean, attracted me to the nautical
shelves because I was pictured there in his books, many times
a Kodak memory, a skinny, towhead kid of nine. His books drew
me to others in the same section, and by the time I went off
to college I doubt there was a book on those shelves I
hadn’t paged through, not a picture I had missed. One of
my favorites was Heavy Weather Sailing by Adlard
Coles, a Brit from Cowes on the Isle of Wight. I didn’t
know it then, of course, but it was a book that became and
remains the standard textbook for surviving storms at sea in
sail boats. Again and again I went back to its series of
plates showing storms whipping the enraged ocean, and the
damaged rigs and hulls of yachts that had been pitch-poled or
turtled. The last and, for me, most fascinating plate of all
showed a rare photograph of a rogue wave eighty or ninety
feet high, rising out of a turbulent, chaotic sea. I remember
also the books of yachting photographs by Stanley and Morris
Rosenfeld, the premier yachting photographers from the
forties to the sixties, and the accounts of the great
single-handers, among them Joshua Slocum, the first to sail
around the world alone, and the great solo racer, Sir Francis
Chichester, whose accounts of solo trans-Atlantic voyages
thrilled me. Many of these pictures and texts are clear in my
mind today, and I believe they had a profound effect on
whatever abilities I have as a sailor, and they have
certainly given me a deeper understanding for the power and
magnitude of even tranquil seas.
Another book I remember well: Ralph
Ceram’s The March of Archaeology, published in
the late fifties, was a popular account of the history of
archaeology. Many a winter’s afternoon found me captive
to the pictures and accounts of the great archaeological
discoveries in Egypt and Asia Minor in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries when layers of Troy were
successively unearthed and the tomb of Tutankhamen
discovered. One picture in particular haunted me, that of the
mummified body of Ramses II—and I swear there was a time
I was checking the book once a week to assure myself that the
mummy was still in print and not in my room. (As it turned
out, a mummy did find its way to my house, if not my room: a
mummy case with scattered body parts left among the linen
wrappings which I recently offered on behalf of a local
consignor. If you think there is no connection between this
mummy case and those parts of The March of Archaeology I absorbed when I was young, you are wrong. When I first
heard of a mummy case needing to be sold, don’t think I
didn’t flash back to the excitement I felt in our family
library thirty-odd years ago.)
In September 1966 I transferred into the
seventh grade of a private school. The summer before, I
encountered my first reading list, a typed list of more than
thirty (yes, thirty!) titles presented to me by my mother,
titles I was told were required reading by the school. It was
daunting, to say the least, but my parents had virtually all
of the books, and we would be on the boats a lot that summer,
so I set in to reading them in a major-league sort of way,
and got through most—eighty or ninety percent of them.
One of the ones I didn’t read was The Prince and the
Pauper. When I arrived for my first day of school in
September I was given my first assignment: book reports on
the three books assigned for summer reading, among them, yes, The Prince and the Pauper. Classmates had it all too
easy, reading Mark Twain and Jack London, and I forget the
third—maybe Salinger. I, on the other hand, a young
teenager in a new school with no friends, was already looked
upon as a freak for having read books like David Goes
Voyaging in the Galapagos, and The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson, and twenty-eight or so others of the same
ilk—a list my mother had snookered me with.
If there is a moral here it is this: kids
don’t just need kids’ books. I had my share of Winnie
the Pooh, the Cat-in-the-Hat series, and my
favorite, One Morning in Maine, which was about a
hurricane. But kids need grown-up books, too, for they will
be grown-ups themselves someday, and navigating the course to
adulthood is no easy chore. Books can still be had for a buck
or two apiece. Two hundred and fifty dollars spent on even
marginal books can have lasting, positive effects of the mind
of a child.
Bigger changes are always in store, and
successive generations will be there to surf them. How well
they surf, how adroitly they navigate their future will
depend on what they know and how they know it. Children can
learn much through the power of observation, and books at any
age level offer much to be observed, whether by reading the
texts or just eyeballing the illustrations; to speak nothing
of the tactile pleasure of holding even a badly-made book.
Books as a whole still offer the best gateway to the past, as
well as the future, and are themselves separate life forms
happily coexisting with our own.
Although I don’t recollect my father
ever reading to me much, if at all, (unless it was hollering
grammatically-lame instructions down a hatch at me trying to
install some gizmo in the bilge) but he could sure tell a
story. On weekends, in the steely half-light of winter
mornings, he would guide my sister and me through the magical
world of Robbie the Rabbit, a happy-go-lucky, unharried hare
who weekly assembled motley and sundry crews and mounted
untold expeditions to capture the moon and bring it down to
earth. The moon was inevitably harnessed, and the crew
inevitably pulled and pulled, but to no avail, even with the
help of celestial winches and cranes. No matter how weird, or
far-fetched either the characters or the plot may have been,
the moon would not budge. Not ever. Years later I saved up
$700 and bought a telescope, thinking I wanted to be an
astronomer. Every kid has dreams, and every piece of
literature—oral or otherwise—an adult to call it
its own.
