My grandmother was a person who loved books. Although my grandfather could barely read and write, there were books in every room in our house, classics, the Stevenson books, the Kipling books, the works of Shakespeare. So, from my earliest years on I would pull books off the shelves and try to read them and then eventually did read them. I wanted books of my own too. There were no book stores. The nearest book store was in Albany, which was 35 miles away or Glens Falls had a small book store.
Occasionally they’d have a few books in one of the local department stores. And it was a thrill when I could buy a book. But I had one kind of strange tick when I was a kid. I would get a book of my own like say Thornton W. Burgess books, the Smiling Pond books like and I’d be reading the book, and then as soon as I finished a page, I’d tear the little bit of the bottom corner off and eat it.
So, these books I have from my childhood all have the lower right-hand corner torn off on every page. You can see how far I’d read it at any particular time. So, I was really digesting literature at an early age.