More musings on The Child That Books Built:

Spufford mentions a phenomenom that I have experienced myself--the child reader who reads words far too complex for him, really, and imagines unusual meanings and pronunciations and then finds them difficult to let go even after gaining enough sophistication to have more understanding. He says a classic example is "misled" which some children read as myzled--the past tense of the verb "to misle" LOL His own favorite example is "grimace" which he still prefers in his imagination to give his own childlike "grimACE rhymes with face" LOL Having once, when I was five, convulsed my parents by announcing during a country drive that there was a great big pile of man-yerr behind that barn, I know what he means. How was I to know that "manure" was not pronounced according to the same reasonable rule as "picture"? I mean, really. :-)

He also writes of the library:

I approached them (the fiction stacks) slowly, not with reverence exactly, but with the feeling that the riches in the room needed to be handled with some kind of grateful attention to their ordered abundance. Also, I knew that once I'd chosen my four books, the multiple possibilities of the library would shrink down to that finite handful. I hated to be hurried out of the great, free bazaar.

I remember feeling that way, too. And in my tiny small-town library, even the "ordered abundance" there seemed insufficient to meet my needs. Like children of the Depression who still hoard string and rubber bands, wasting nothing, out of memory of the times when there WAS nothing, I may never recover from the feeling that one day, I would run out of things to read. Since I owned only a handful of books myself, I methodically began reading my way around the children's section. I finished when I was nine, not taking into accoun, naturally, the small subset of books worthy to be reread again, and for which I periodically descended the stairs even into adulthood. The adult rooms upstairs looked so large to begin with, but by my mid-teens, the appropriate and interesting had started to diminish and I was on letter T, with not very much left afterwards. It was a near-panicked sensation, contemplating what I would do when I finished Z. I would RUN OUT! What on earth would I do with myself?
Fortunately I was able to occupy myself until leaving for college in the "big city". But I still suffer from a fear that I will "run out"; partly because my standards are higher now, and while I can mentally summon a list of books that will take me decades yet to finish, they are not all available in my town/library/home yet. This is why I have a love/hate relationship with my endless stacks of unread books; sometimes they seem to be jeering at me, reproaching me for not having read them yet, and I threaten them with dumping in the fires of File 13. They know, though, that I will never do that; I would sooner burn my food storage. Those tottering stacks represent insurance to me--the reassurance that THIS MONTH at least, I will NOT "run out": there will be something fit to read.