Books & Popular Culture
All the “F” Words You Need
Almost all of them anyway
People regularly bemoan their mother having thrown out their childhood comic book collection. It’s as though everybody thinks they had an Action Comics #1 (the debut of Superman) hidden in the stack of Archies or my favorite, Mad Magazine. I am certain my trove contained no such forgotten gems.
That doesn’t mean something dear wasn’t discarded. Mother couldn’t have known. After all, what she tossed out was dated, long-unused and had the collectable rarity of beach sand. I’d say the act was forgiven but there was nothing to forgive. If they meant that much at the time, I’d have taken them with me when I left home. Fortunately, eBay is the font of all childhood relics waiting to be reclaimed. A couple of years ago, I found a substitute and purchased it.
In specific, I purchased a complete set of The New Book of Knowledge: The Children’s Encyclopedia, published by Grolier Incorporated. The twenty-volume set is copyright 1967. They are bound in a creamy white tooled leather-like material with gold foil lettering and what I take to be the Tree of Knowledge in gold foil, set against a blue background. They are thick tomes, symbolic of the depth of information they contain.
