She let me choose one Classic Illustrated each time. But how was I to know?Įach week Mom took me to Piggly Wiggly grocer, where they mixed the Classics Illustrated with the Supermans, Veronicas and Tom and Jerrys on a rotating rack. When I was a budding reader, Mom introduced me to Classics Illustrated comic books, each one promoting on its cover “Stories by the world’s greatest authors.” These versions were 15 cent-ers with titles like “Hamlet,” “Huckleberry Finn,” “Treasure Island,” “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” “Alice in Wonderland,” “The Call of the Wild,” “Joan of Arc,” “Frankenstein” – colorful for sure, and way, way abridged, of course. You could tell she loved the stories she read. Instead, I do remember eavesdropping on Mom’s telephone talks with her girlfriends about books they’d read, about why so-and-so did what to whom and “How’d you like it when they … ?” She seemed so concerned and earnest about the fictional characters. But westerns, books about war, sports and Hollywood lay all about, too.Īs I recall, there was no such thing as book clubs back then. Mom and Dad’s go-tos were romance fiction and anything mafia, respectively.

I liked it when one lay open-faced and at the ready, a sign that one of us had just been reading it or would be in a moment or two so “Don’t move it!”

They were scattered in every room: perched messily above the kitchen sink, lying next to the nightstands next to either side of my parents’ bed, stacked on the coffee table, shelved erratically in living room bookcases, piled next to the toilet. Despite Mom’s obsession with maintaining a tidy home where everything had its place, books were the exception. Richard Schwartz I remember the comforting feeling of being surrounded by books in our small apartment in north Minneapolis.

The Ship That Flew by Hilda Lewis