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However, the library was not the only source of books available to the probing mind. There was home. And in my instance, the bookcase in the dining room, filled to bursting with my father’s precious collection of bad books. We did not subscribe to Literary magazines. I doubt whether my father had ever read a book review in his entire life, if he even knew they existed, so hence he read for pure pleasure and ran heavily to The Claw of Fu Manchu, The Canary Murder Case, The Riders of the Purple Sage, and the complete exploits of Philo Vance. At least these were the books that he kept in the dining-room bookcase. I never really associated them with book reports. They were just Stories, and book reports were about Books.

There were other volumes that were kept around the house, were not talked about much, but were just there. Not many, just a few mysterious books kept in my parents’ bedroom, or in the closet. No one ever said we shouldn’t read them. They were just kept out of our way. For as long as I could remember there had been this thick green-covered, bulky book on the bottom shelf of my mother’s end table. It had been there so long and was so much a part of the scenery that it wasn’t a book any more; just a Thing. It was always there. I had opened it maybe twice in my entire life—tiny print, incomprehensible; just a book. Until that pivotal day when everything changed.

It was a chill, dark, lowering afternoon. Faint puffs of oily wind bearing the essence of Phillips 66 and the Number-One Open Hearth through the gaunt trees, and under the eaves. I was home alone. And itchy.

These are dangerous conditions, known to us all. Ranging through the empty house, looking for something to do, somewhere to light, chewing a salami sandwich, I homed in inevitably to the Fountain of Evil. I rarely went into my parents’ bedroom, because it was somehow off my main beat. Nothing Freudian or Victorian; it just wasn’t where my action was. However, as the barometer fell and my itch increased, I drifted in past the brass bed, just looking. Drawn.

The how and why of the exact instant the Book came into my hands I do not clearly recall, and perhaps even that fact is significant. I somehow knew without even being told that it was wrong. I somehow knew that what I was doing was vaguely on the other side of the line. Our instincts run deep.

I dragged the book, my ears acutely alert for footsteps on the porch, into the bathroom and began my descent into iniquity and degradation.

The title of the book meant nothing to me. I had not seen it on Miss Easter’s shelves, nor on Miss Bryfogel’s Selected lists, but it was thick and had small print, so I figured it must be good. Or at least Official. Not only that, it had a foreign name, and anyone who has ever gone to school knows that any book with a foreign name is Important.

Well, I hadn’t read four sentences when I realized that I had in my hands the golden key to Miss Bryfogel’s passionate heart. Not only was this book almost totally incomprehensible, it was about friars and abbots, counts and countesses, knight errants, kings and queens, and a lot of Italians. It also had pictures, woodcuts that reminded me of other Important books that Miss Bryfogel spoke highly of. In accordance with my usual practice of book reporting, I looked through the Table of Contents to pick out something specific to read and to quote in case of embarrassing questions.

I had never seen a Table of Contents like this before. It was listed:

“Day The First”

“Day The Second”

“Day The Third”

and under that heading something caught my eye:

“The First Story:

Massetto of Lamporeccio feigneth himself dumb and becometh gardener to a convent of women, who all flock to lie with him.”

Well, this was a natural, since I knew what “dumb” meant. There were plenty of dumb kids in my class. And Mrs. Kissel, next door, had a garden. I was on home grounds.

I plowed ahead, and the more I struggled to read the more I realized that this was good for at least a B+. My senses alert to sounds in the driveway, I