Books

"When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes."

Erasmus (1466-1536)

I share the addiction of Erasmus. My worst habit and greatest joy is one and the same thing: Books. This bibliophilism I inherited from my father. He loved books. He loved everything about books. He loved the way they smelled, the way they felt in his hands, the way they expanded his understanding. And he passed that love on to me.

I wish I knew where he got the book addiction. As I remember Grandpa and Grandma Kear's house, there were very few books about. I do not remember either of my paternal grandparents reading. I know that they did. They read their Bibles. In his last years, the Jehovah's Witnesses came to see Grandpa and left him some of their tracts and booklets. He seemed to read them enough to know that he didn't agree with what they were teaching.

On my LeCrone side, things were a bit different. There were always books around. You must remember, Grandma LeCrone's mother had been a school teacher and a librarian. Great-grandma Lanham (I called her "Grandma-Grandma") loved to read and had collected literally thousands of books during her life. In Pa and Grandma LeCrone's house there were several bookcases filled with wonderful books. It was in these shelves that I first discovered the Hardy Boys. I'm not talking about the refurbished, modernized monstrosities in the blue covers. No, these were the old originals, fairly dripping with nostalgic mystery and adventure. It was like reading a 1930s black and white movie.

There were religious books aplenty, including a matching Bible Dictionary and Commentary which now sit in my own bookcase.

There were novels and classics and health books. In 1976, when I was in high school, I came upon a copy of Richard Adams' Watership Down tucked into one of Grandma's bookshelves. Grandma said it wasn't hers. I have no idea who left it there, but I jumped into that novel with both feet and it became one of my all-time favorite books.

Pa LeCrone never completed his education (I think he made it to the sixth grade), so reading was a bit difficult for him. But he did enjoy an occasional Zane Grey or Louis L'Amour western.

My Dad had several thousand books in his library. He had so many that when he died, Mom kept as many as she could, and each of us kids took some home with us and still there were boxes and boxes of them left over. We ended up donating the remainder of them to a theology student.

Dad was a theologian. Or perhaps it would be better said that he was a Bible student. That is what he loved to read, biblical studies. While he bought a few volumes of fiction for us when we were kids, I don't ever recall him reading a work of fiction himself. He just didn't care for it.

I grew up reading. Even before I could read, I would get one of Dad's books from the shelf and look at the pictures for hours at a time. Many of his Bible books were generously illustrated and held a bountiful fascination for me. My mother would also read to my sister and me, usually from the 10-volume set The Bible Story, or from Uncle Arthur's Bedtime Stories, a 20-volume set. After I learned to read I read everything I could get my hands on. Adventure stories were my favorites as a child. I remember being especially fond of true adventures of frontier times. Give me true cowboys and Indians stories! I also read biographies. My favorite book from childhood was called The Unlikeliest Hero by Booten Herndon, the true story of Corporal Desmond T. Doss, a conscientious objector who, while serving in the South Pacific during World War II as a medic, won the Congressional Medal of Honor without ever touching a gun.

Today, I have a ton of books. I buy them, read them, keep some, give some away. I'm a bibliophile. I got the disease from my father and from my maternal grandmother and great-grandmother. It's not such a bad malady. I think I can live with it.