Indelible Miscellaneous Memories of a Bibliophile

By Francis Coan, PhD

A wise and generous God, knowing that I would choose to become an historian, kindly ordained that I would be born into a family of readers (including, importantly, my parents, especially Dad, and my two older sisters) and a household full of books. We had little money to spare after the bills were paid, but we probably owned several hundred volumes, hardcover and paperback, fiction and non-fiction alike. We also had free access to the collections of our school and municipal libraries. All of this provided ample literary and intellectual sustenance for the curious, growing minds of the four Coan kids.  

The first book I recall reading (and, I believe, having read to me by Mom and my older sisters) was entitled The Dragon Who Liked to Spit Fire. It was a tale of a young prince who found a young dragon in the forest, adopted the beast, and brought it to live with him in the family castle. Problem being, the dragon, through no fault of his own, had this nasty habit of lighting things ablaze each time he sneezed. I don’t remember the rest of the story very well, but after some difficulties and tensions the dragon got to stay and everybody, especially the prince and the dragon, lived happily ever after. Many years later, I discovered that this work won some prize for children’s literature, which may explain why whoever gave it to me (I don’t remember who that was) gave it to me. I also recall that I marked up my copy of the book with crayons, an innocent boyhood act of vandalism, defacement, and cultural destruction that I still regret. I cringe at the thought of writing anything in a book, even in pencil, except in an emergency.     

Another early book memory is The Story of Pratt and Whitney my father kept in my parent’s bedroom. I still have this volume. Many a Sunday morning, the one day a week Dad slept in later than 6:00 a.m., I would pad into the room, take this book down from the shelf, sit on the bed next to my father, and peruse the pages. I’m quite sure I first thumbed through this work before I was able to read a word of it. The volume was profusely illustrated with photographs, some black and white but many color, of Wasp engines, Gee Bee racing planes, and every military and commercial aircraft powered by Pratt engines through about 1955, including numerous World War Two fighters and bombers. Dad had a fascination with flight, among other topics, a product of growing up between the world wars and witnessing the transition from biplanes in his boyhood to supersonic jets in his middle age. Next to the Pratt and Whitney book, there was a history of the Supermarine Spitfire, packed with pictures of one of the most elegant and beautiful fighters ever designed; Duel of Eagles by Peter Townsend (I didn’t read this one, perhaps the best book ever written on the Battle of Britain, until I was a bit older); and two or three volumes, one written by Gene Gurney, on World War One fighter aces. One of the last-mentioned works contained a nice, neat table of the names of the top aces, subdivided by country, and the number of confirmed “kills” ascribed to each.   

Down in our cellar, Dad built a bench, used as a place to work on hobbies and crafts, and over the bench a set of bookshelves. I found all manner of literary treasures there, and more each year as my reading abilities grew. We had a set of classics, bound in burnt orange covers trimmed with black, each illustrated with some very nice line drawings. Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Little Women, Black Beauty, Anne of Green Gables, and indeed most of the other works failed to capture my interest. I waded through King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table but found it boring, repetitive, and without a theme I could discern. Sir This and Sir That and too many jousts. On the other hand, I was enthralled with The Tales of Robin Hood and The Story of Paul Bunyan, both of which I read many times. I can still see that drawing of Robin, on one knee with head bowed, seemingly doomed and defeated after being bested in his swordfight with Sir Guy of Gisborne, preparing to thrust his blade through the throat of his overconfident, arrogant, unsuspecting foe. And Johnny Inkslinger is one of the great characters of American folklore.  

The mid-level bookshelves were filled by our set of Encyclopeadia Brittanica. This assemblage  cost my parents a pretty penny, but they invested their money well as my three sisters and I used these volumes innumerable times---for school papers and reports but also to satisfy personal interest---for several decades. Brittanica was the gold standard reference source of its day: authoritative, detailed, and beautifully written. It was the equivalent of a Google search before the internet existed. Imagine an introverted young lad happily poring over various of these volumes for hours, sometimes deliberately searching for specific information and sometimes simply browsing at random, reading about every conceivable subject that struck his fancy. History, biography, geography, the arts, literature, the physical and life sciences . . . I had never known so much information even existed. It was fun and effortless learning, and always rewarding. Indeed, I had no idea at the time how rewarding my self-motivated and self-guided learning efforts would prove to be.  

On the center bookshelf, near the globe, were arrayed perhaps a dozen sets of science booklets, four booklets to a set, each set encased in a gray cardboard slipcase. Each booklet came with a couple of sheets of glossy color photographs, each of which had to be cut out with a pair of scissors and glued onto the appropriate page. These short works, along with the encyclopedias, provided me with excellent primers on astronomy, physics (not my favorite subject), ballistics (ditto), earthquakes, volcanoes, geology, hurricanes, tornadoes, and meteorology. At the time our edition of Britannica and these booklets (which may have been ancillaries to the encyclopedias) were published, Hurricane Hazel and the 1964 Good Friday earthquake were practically current events, quasars had just been discovered, and a minority of planetary scientists still held out hope that the Martian surface might support lichens.  

My older sisters amassed a sizeable collection of paperback books, some from high school and college coursework and some purchased as pleasure reading. Many of these were arrayed in a long row on the back of the bench in the cellar. Gold nuggets included 1984, a collection of Orwell essays, an anthology entitled Tales of the Weird and Strange (“Dune Roller” scared me but made me long to walk the sand dunes along Lake Michigan, which I finally did three years ago), 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Fantastic Voyage (the last two works illustrated with stills taken from the respective epiphanous movies).  

And then there was the Big Dictionary with the blue and white cover. I don’t recall who published that, but our family used it so often that the spine was broken. Besides being a utilitarian work for looking up word spellings, pronunciations, and meanings, it was yet another place for an inquisitive young mind to wander far and wide. As befitted a book published about the time of Project Gemini, the preliminary pages included fascinating diagrams documenting the history of atmospheric and space exploration, along with a list of the planets (nine in those days: Pluto had not yet been demoted by the historically and culturally narrow-minded and ignorant), the size and mass of each, and the mean distance of each from Earth.  

More than any other volume in our home, I was engrossed by the Hammond World Atlas. It had a fawn colored, faux leather cover embossed with a magnificent clipper ship in full sail. I studied every page of this publication. If I had a better grasp of Connecticut, United States, and global geography than any of my primary and secondary school classmates (which I did) it was largely due to this atlas. Continents, countries, states, provinces, and counties, depicted in several neutral colors, well-chosen by the cartographers; major cities and rivers, with topographical features such as mountains and hills shown using stylish shaded relief; maps on the historical geography of Canada, and others depicting the Colonial Wars, American Revolutionary War, and War of 1812, with blue and red flow lines, labelled with the surnames of commanding officers, denoting troop (sometimes naval) movements and, next to the site and name of each major battle, a little flag of the victorious country; a section entitled “The Races of Man,” complete with pictures of supposedly archetypal humans, that would not be published in an atlas today; a chapter providing a brief summary of the history and map of the chief economic activities of each state, with symbols for each type of activity (e.g., a gear for manufacturing, a steer for ranching, a beach umbrella for tourism); a list of the global biggest, tallest, longest, etc. (mountains, rivers, waterfalls, seas and oceans, islands). And the intriguing places, many of them remote and isolated (I guess I’ve always been attracted to remote and isolated places), and compelling toponyms: Flagstaff, Yellowknife, Uranium City, Christmas Island (with settlements named London and Paris), Glendora, California (where my maternal grandparents resided), Belgian Congo, Tashkent, French West Africa, Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea, the Gran Chaco, Liechtenstein, the Isle of Man, Krakatoa. We owned a second atlas, this one with Atlas on the cover straining to shoulder the world and managing to do so, but I used this work much less  than I did the Hammond book. 

We had a small collection of Golden Books, but I remember only two: one on meteorology (and who is not interested in weather?) and the other a history of the American Revolution. The latter volume included an evocative color rendering of Generals Richard Montgomery and Benedict Arnold leading their men, winding up a cliffside path in single file, on their doomed assault on Quebec on the last day of 1775. It is dark, a blizzard is raging, and the poorly-clad men huddle against the wind and cold. They look miserable, but they also look grim and determined.   

We also owned a modest group of comic books, which my older sisters safeguarded: Batman, Superman, Spider Man, the Incredible Stretch, Archie, and others I’ve forgotten. A few were compilations of creepy, hokey, or just plain odd stories: unscrupulous, adventuresome, globetrotting men finding lost tribes and hidden kingdoms, trying to steal something of great value from the indigenous inhabitants, and suffering horrific fates; man-eating army ants; an alien, looking much like an octopus, taking up residence in a couple’s basement, bothering them not at all, and systematically killing and eating half the residents of their town without their knowledge before departing back to its home planet. While I enjoyed all of these tales, they were but poor fare as compared to books, a junk food snack rather than a nutritious three-course meal. Similarly, the old editions of Weekly Reader my sisters had read before I knew how to read didn’t hold my interest for long. The Timbertoes, Goofus and Gallant, and the hidden items puzzles are fond memories, but I don’t recall a single story or feature beyond these.     

In the kitchen, under the telephone book that resided in the second drawer to the right of the sink, I found two civil defense booklets, published and distributed to the public during the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, respectively. I learned all about splinting broken bones, staunching bleeding, recognizing the signs of radiation sickness, shielding one’s family from fallout (I can still see that drawing of a woman vacuuming up dust, presumably in the aftermath of World War Three, to keep her family safe and clean), and how the CONELRAD system (forerunner to the current Emergency Broadcast System) worked. These readings probably exacerbated my fears of being incinerated by a Soviet bomber or ICBM in my sleep, but they were interesting nonetheless.  

A few months shy of my fifth birthday, I was sent off to kindergarten: the first half of the school year at the antiquated, brick, institutional Sarah Reynolds and the last half, to be followed by six more years of elementary school, at the newly-built Mountain View. I don’t remember what grade I was in when my teacher (Mrs. Schreiner? Mrs. Masotti? Mrs. Wasta?) took my classmates and me to the school library to select and check out books for the first time. Regardless, that was a very happy day and became a weekly event that I looked forward to. If I was to be transported back into that library as it existed at the time and blindfolded, I would be able to navigate my way to the books that I loved as easily as a squirrel is able to locate his buried caches of acorns.  

The books for little children were located to the right as one entered the library, where two sets of shelving units intersected at a ninety degree angle. While I read a fair amount of Dr. Seuss, my favorites were not Green Eggs and Ham, Horton Hears a Who, or The Grinch that Stole Christmas but rather The 1001 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins and McEllicot’s Pool. Another favorite, not written by Theodor Geisel, was I Wish I Had Duck Feet, a tale that reinforced the wisdom of counting one’s blessings and being contented with what one has. 

The science works were shelved to the left of the entryway. I devoured every Roy Gallant book I could get my hands on. Earthquakes, tsunami, volcanoes, hurricanes, severe thunderstorms, tornadoes . . . Gallant was a skilled and prolific popularizer of science. The cover art of one of his works featured an ominous, dark, twisting funnel cloud menacing a farm, presumably somewhere on the Great Plains or in the Midwest.     

The history and geography books were amassed near the northeastern corner of the library, close to the window overlooking the main parking lot in front of the school. Robert Leckie, The Story of World War Two . . . Bruce Bliven, The American Revolution . . . The Story of the American Civil War, with a Union color bearer and his Confederate counterpart engaging in hand-to-hand combat on the cover . . . a “you are there” historical fiction account of the Battle of Gettysburg starring a Union drummer boy who, similar to Forrest Gump, manages to be present at every decisive moment of that bloody battle, including the fight for Little Round Top and Pickett’s Charge . . . Up From The Sea: Stories of Marine Salvage, with chapters on the U.S.S. Squalus and the raising of the American battleships sunk at Pearl Harbor. . . American Heritage histories of the Battle of the Bulge and the carrier war in the Pacific . . . a riveting work on Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe (well, he didn’t make it, but eighteen of his men did, three years after departing Spain) . . . a work on the Spanish conquistadors . . . Edwin Tunis, Weapons, featuring exquisite drawings of stone spear points, bombards, pistols, muskets, rifles, machine guns, nuclear cannon, and scores of other tools of war. And many, many more works I read only once or twice as opposed to the multiple times I read each of the aforementioned books. 

Public school also introduced my classmates and me to the Scholastic Book Fair. Once per year, we were able to purchase books: low-cost paperbacks, fiction and non-fiction, classics and contemporary fare alike. Few of these linger in my mind, but I still have my copy of H.G. Wells, War of the Worlds and treasure the quirky, fun Artemus Flint: Detective.  

To recount my childhood ramblings and discoveries in the Bristol public libraries, the newspapers and magazines I read, or the notable books I received as gifts or acquired on my own would be to add greatly to a tale that is already overlong. And, of course, this is only the first chapter of that tale, the story of a boy falling in love with reading and learning, a tale shared by millions of fellow humans and differing only in the details, a tale that is ongoing even though the boy is a boy no longer, a tale that will endure as long as he does and, he hopes, beyond. For while hell has no books (all get the Fahrenheit 451 treatment, for books might make hell endurable), heaven must have an infinite number, and all the time in the universe to savor each and every one. 

Dr. Coan is Professor of History Emeritus at Tunxis Community College.