Flashback: Books Everywhere

Prompt #7: “Were there books in evidence around your house? Was there a special room in the house considered the ‘library’? Which of your parents’ books do you remember reading? Which books do you remember them reading?”

We had a small house, certainly too small for a “library”–but we had books, that’s for sure.

We had two tall bookcases in the living room, one on either side of the door that led first to Mom and Dad’s bedroom and later to the schoolroom.

The bookshelf on the right contained three sets of encyclopedias–a children’s set, a set of Comptons, and the Encyclopedia Britannica. The bookshelf on the left bore a multi-colored set of illustrated children’s classics and a collection of Biblical reference works–different translations of the Bible, a concordance, Nave’s topical Bible, some Bible atlases, an interlinear Bible with Greek and Hebrew as well as English. An end table cupboard held all of our children’s picture books–when they weren’t spilled out around the house.

Dad has never been much of a reader, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t see him read. In fact, if I was up early enough to see Dad before he left for work, I’d always see him reading. He’d sit at the kitchen table, munching on his cereal and reading the Bible.

Dad was also a big fan of reference works. Often, we’d get into a discussion at the dinner table that would end with the injunction to “look it up”. We’d dutifully go and get whichever reference work was appropriate and look it up. We kids gravitated toward the glossy-paged, full color Comptons when we looked things up, but Dad often made us get out the Britannica to look things up too.

I’m running out of time and have to get to work…but I still have plenty more to say–so I’ll probably end up with a Flashback part 2 this afternoon/evening.