Thursday, May 29, 2008

Jumping aboard the Wayback Machine...

Feeling a little nostalgic today.  I won't bore you with a long, rambling, I-remember-when, but I was thinking about the first book I recall owning -- a Hardy Boys juvenile novel, published in 1959: "The Mystery of Cabin Island."  (This was, I believe, the original 1929 version; it's important to identify when a Hardy Boy book was published, since the book was revised to eliminate ethnic stereotypes and update vernacular in the mid-Sixties.)  Loved that book.  Still do.  And that's all I have to say about that.  What was the first book you remember owning?

1 comment:

Richard said...

There are many candidates for the honor, but the one that comes to mind most prominently is the SF juvenile The Runaway Robot which I believed for all these years to be a work by Lester del Rey but turns out actually to have been written by Paul W. Fairman from an outline by del Rey. I'm a stickler for getting writer credits correct. Another possible candidate (and one that reveals my age pretty conclusively) would be the Whitman Big Little Book "Moon Mission" by George S. Elrick. I'm pretty sure my first book would have been one of these two: both SF books involving space travel, playing a major formative role in my subsequent literary tastes.