when books were real

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

(Dad’s 1932 copy of Jack the Giant Killer / Julie Cook / 2017)

Not a voracious reader…
not a fast reader…
not always an interested reader….
but a reader none the less…

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again…
oh how I do love books.

Real honest to goodness books.

No e-readers or iPads.
But the tangible, hold it in my hand, turn the page, smell that bookish
musty smell love of a book.

I know the arguments about books…
those being that books are expensive, cumbersome, heavy, accumulating,
outdated, hard to travel with… as the list goes on and on.

Hand a kid a “notebook”, iPad or something else equally electronic and techie
and you’ve got a quiet, occupied, engaged kid…

And sadly I suppose you do.

Engaging the mind you say.
Stimulating brain cells, building higher order thinking skills….
yet all the while lessening personal contact and personal connectivity.
As in isolation.

But there are those who will argue that that is exactly how it was
with a kid with a book.

There they’d sit for hours on end engrossed reading, alone…isolated….

…but oh what of that imagination building….
the dreams of those far away places, people and lands…
And what of the bonding that came from sitting next to someone special who would
read those tales and adventures as your mind raced off to a myriad of different
places and times…

These are a few of my dad’s books from the early 1930’s when he was just a young boy.
He was not a keen reader yet he loved a good story.
Those stories in those books would take that young boy to places other than
his own room.

Dad always treasured his books.

Having just recently rediscovered these books, I am awed by the color,
clarity and quality of these well loved childhood books.
They have remained relatively intact and are still very much treasured.

I can remember when I was a little girl as my dad would read these same books
to me each night before bed.
I couldn’t wait until he turned to the page with the pop-up image as my mind
and imagination would place me right down in the middle of the image and action—
making the story soar, becoming so much bigger then life…

Ode to the time when one’s imagination would take them on so many grand adventures….

Blessed is he who reads and those who hear the words of the prophecy,
and heed the things which are written in it; for the time is near.
Revelation 1:3