In My Youth Author:James Baldwin Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III " THIS IS MY LIBRARY " IF there was one thing of which my father was justly and openly proud, that was his library. There was nothing like it i... more »n the New Settlement, and I fondly believed that there were few collections of books in the whole world that could rival it in variety and completeness. Some of our neighbors possessed an almanac or two, and in every Friend's house there was a family Bible, to say nothing of an occasional tract on slavery. In homes where there were children, one might find a few dilapidated school-books, hidden away in old hair trunks or among the cobwebs and dust of the cabin loft. But nowhere was there such a collection of printed works as that which gave honor and distinction to the cabin wherein I was born. Our bookcase, as we called it, consisted of two shelves, made by laying short boards upon some wooden pegs that had been driven into the wall, midway between the fireplace and the corner cupboard. It was so high that in order to reach the lowest books I was obliged to stand upon a chair. The shelves were placed one directly above the other, and they were scarcely half as long as the five-foot shelf recently made popular and glorified by an ex-president of our oldest university. The books were arranged with some care, the larger volumes on the upper shelf, the lesser on the lower. The collection made such an unusual appearance, that theneighbors who sometimes visited us seemed awed when they came near it, as though uncertain how to behave in the presence of so much preserved wisdom. " This is my library," father would say, standing up very straight and tall, and running his fingers lovingly across the backs of the books. And our visitors would stand with open mouths, gazing and wondering — some admiring, but more condemning ...« less