A Complete Works, maybe 6 volumes? resided in my wonderful new bookshelves, the shelves that were put up in my new bedroom when we moved to 818 in 1955. I was 10.
Edgar Allen Poe was a writer of creepy stories, nightmares, burials-while-living, murderous machines, deaths of the beloved, etc. I read them all, not particularly taken by anything I read, or frightened either. The Murders in the Rue Morgue was possibly the most enjoyable because it was an early detective story. What did Edgar Allen Poe do for me? He gave me plenty of practice in decoding early 19th century prose and vocabulary. I did appreciate The Raven and Annabel Lee, the music of those poems appealed.
Well, the bookshelves meant more to me than Mr Creepy. They were New, a quality I valued exceedingly at that time. Four or five long pine floorboards filling an alcove in my new bedroom. New wood, pale pine, unvarnished, so exciting. And they were supported by the most marvellous bricks, shades of pale peach and thrillingly new and clean and modern-looking. Though it never occurred to me to think about it, it was Mamma who realised this was perfect for me,
All the shelves were full right away. My mother must have retrieved a library of collected works from Grandma and Grandpa's house. In those days books were kept, never recycled, so I got the benefit of someone's taste in literature. Whose?? I am guessing it was Aunt Eunice, Great Grandpa's second wife. She had been a schoolteacher, 6th grade, until her elevation to the pinnacle of Gladstone society in 1922 when she (60-something) married Great Grandpa, a widower after the death of Grandma Rose. I'm pretty sure hers were the collected works of Flaubert.
Of course, Grandma Rose might have bought some of the books, the money was there after all. Once the factory got going, the twentieth century must have been prosperous for them. I speculate she might even have bought some for Great Grandpa, because it seems to me some of the authors would have appealed more to men, and, who knows, among his many fine qualities, Great Grandpa might have had a taste for reading.
In fact, the collected short stories of O Henry and the frozen north of Jack London (several volumes of each) appealed to me as well. White Fang and The Call of the Wild were favourites. I remember that strangeness of reading a book written from the point of view of a dog or a wolf. School readers provided nothing like that.
Other books: the complete works of Charles Dickens in, I believe, 20 volumes of very small type and thin paper. I read my way through these, finding a little to engage me in A Tale of Two Cities. (So obvs I was a teenager by then.) Otherwise, these books fed my habit: Reading, doesn't matter what it is. I didn't come to Dickens till decades later, when I discovered he had something that Trollope lacked.
Some of the books in those modern-looking shelves were Mamma's college texts. A primer in Spanish! I went through that one, wishing to understand it all Anthologies for Poetry 101, with all the 19th-century classics, expensively bound too. bought in the 1920s. That's where Byron and Tennyson first turned up for me. I read these too, liking a few showy lines here and there, not knowing how much I'd love some poems in the future. A book that had an interesting cover was New Wings for Women. Red white and blue, lively with diagonals, shouting Modern!! I never bothered to look inside that book, obviously a post-WW2 production and of no interest to me, child of the conservative Upper Peninsula 1950s that I was. There were a couple of Art books, reproductions of pictures from, possibly, the Art Institute in Chicago, where Mamma had studied in the 30s. I looked at these pictures, didn't understand or think, just looked.
Another bookshelf in that room was a tall narrow set of 6 shelves, just right for paperbacks. When I started buying books, that's where they went. You got books at drugstores from a revolving rack. I remember my fine collection of 1950s science fiction. Ray Bradbury, Frederick Pohl, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clark: writers who could imagine living on another world. That appealed to me A LOT. Before I knew how to go about it, I knew I wanted to live in another world.
At the same time, I bought Classics from the drugstore, when poss. My beloved copy of Jane Eyre, with my 14 yr old signature in best Palmer Method. Some time later I bought The Ambassadors by Henry James, and signed that one too, with my new grown-up signature. Jane Eyre went straight into my bloodstream, Henry James never did.
This narrow bookshelf was painted ivory colour, to match my Louis XV bedroom suite with double bed, dressing table, desk and chair. The bed had a turquoise chenille spread, and altogether I was pleased with these things.
The books were the best, though.
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