Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has also appeared in many articles. I want to highlight a few quotations of his about books and reading that I came across recently.
The first quotation, which is from Conan Doyle's Through the Magic Door, speaks for itself; it says it all:
“...that love of books...is among the choicest gifts of the gods.”
Many people who are great readers would agree with this.
Sherlock Holmes says this about himself in The Adventure of the Lion's Mane:
“I am an omnivorous reader with a strangely retentive memory for trifles.”
I too am an avid reader who sometimes remembers small details, even from books that I may not have read for decades. Many of the 'trifles' I recalled from the distant past have appeared in or even inspired various articles.
Another quotation from Conan Doyle's Through the Magic Door comes very close to home:
“It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own.”
While I will never forget the debt that I owe to public libraries, it really was great to have a small collection of my own books from an early age.
Many others felt the same. J. B. Priestley, who lunched on twopenny bags of stale buns so that he could save up to buy volumes from Everyman's Library, is a good example of someone who wanted books of his own.
I still remember how delighted I was when someone gave me the first two books I ever owned. One was Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island; the other was The Marvels & Mysteries of Science by Ellison Hawks.
I was only seven years old at the time, but even though I didn't understand everything in them I still got a lot of enjoyment from those books.
The titles seemed magical to me, and the books opened the door to new worlds. They were a perfect complement: one primarily provided fuel for my imagination; the other gave me food for my mind. Conversely, I got some historical and geographical information from the exciting adventure story and some material that stirred my imagination from the science book, which I read through many times.
The Marvels & Mysteries of Science was first published in 1939; the pictures were black and white and not very good quality by today's standards, but I studied them over and over again. I particularly liked the frontispiece with the planets and the gorilla:
My books had plain covers that didn't do justice to the treasures within. They were the same editions as these ones:
