Doctor Dolittle's Post Office, by Hugh Lofting

My father was an upholsterer and a Baptist preacher.  In his role as an upholsterer, people sometimes gave him unwanted furniture, which he'd then either sell, or keep for our own use.  One of the most memorable pieces was a large, glass-fronted cabinet; a bookcase made of cherry wood with an old, dark, gummy finish.  It stood about five feet tall and six feet wide, and lived near the front of my father's shop, in his "office", which was just a front corner by one of the display windows, with a desk and a telephone.

Most importantly, when my father acquired this cabinet it still contained a residue of books.  There was a three-volume People's Cyclopedia of Universal  Knowledge.  There were the six volumes of The Century Dictionary.  There were novels, like The Romance of an Old-Fashioned Gentleman by F. Hopkinson Smith, and The Cardinal's Mistress by Benito Mussolini (!).  There was a large, coverless book of photographs of places in Switzerland and Italy, from around 1900.  (Each page was thick cardboard, and there was one large photograph per page.)

As I've mentioned elsewhere, there were few books in the houses I frequented as a child.  The books in this cabinet became my treasures.  I claimed them all; all except one volume of the Century Dictionary, which my father casually gave away to a curious visitor.  The loss still pains me.

One of the books in the cabinet was Doctor Dolittle's Post Office, by Hugh Lofting (which I mistakenly read as "High Lofting" for many years).  It became the first "real" book (not a "Little Golden Book" or some such) that I ever read all the way through.  I loved this book.  I loved it so much I wept when I was done with it, devastated by the thought that the book was over.

Daybreak - 2250 A.D., by Andre Norton

I attended grade school in a small town that might remind you of Andy Griffith's Mayberry.  My father had a shop on Main Street, and he dropped me off at school every morning.  There were two schools, for first through fourth grade and fifth through eighth grade, both also on Main Street and within easy walking distance of my father's shop. Afternoons, I walked along the sidewalk from school to my father's shop,  being careful not to break my mother's back, and pausing at the town's single stoplight to wait for one of the town's two policemen to help me cross the street.  I'd wait for my father to finish his work, then we'd drive back home.

From Atoms to Stars, by Theodore Askounes Ashford

There were tobacco warehouses along the French Broad River in Asheville, North Carolina, where I grew up.  During the off-season, when they were empty of tobacco, these huge buildings housed flea markets.  When I was a kid, my father and I spent a lot of great Saturdays rummaging through them.   We both loved junk.  For us, visiting junk shops or flea markets was like exploring a marvelous cave or a tropical jungle.

Mostly, I was looking for books, and they were there in abundance at prices almost anyone could afford.   I bought science and math textbooks and old Science Fiction magazines, and browsed through boxes of pulp magazines from my father's era. (Doc Savage! The Shadow!) The pulps were too pricey for me to buy though, even then.  Most of the books I bought cost around 25 cents.

The Golden Book Encyclopedia of Natural Science (Volume 1)

It was the early 1960s, and I was about three years old.  I was spending the day at my Aunt Flora Mae's house.  My Aunt was in the kitchen, and I was roaming around the living room, exploring.  This book was lying on a shelf underneath an end table.

Books were scarce in  the houses I visited then.  Other than a Bible, there might be no books at all.  After some  hesitation, I picked up the book and opened it.  It was wonderful!  It had so many things in it!

 My Aunt came into the room.  She smiled at me and said, "Do you like that? You can have it."