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I can't remember my father, who may have finished 3rd grade, ever reading a book. But he inherited hundreds of books from his mother's last husband. They were published in the 1800's and included every issue of Harper's Weekly for 1876 (Little Bighorn reported in July and the Hayes-Tilden election). Before my teens I had read Shakespeare (I began with Charles & Mary Lamb) , Dickens, A. Conan Doyle (still own that 1st edition), Wilkie Collins, Poe, Hawthorne, Stowe, Alcott...many others. I particularly enjoyed an ancient school book about mythology.
Now I think my childhood was particularly rich, having been blessed with a mountaineer/woodsman father who loved to pass on his knowledge (how to tell the difference between a pine and a fir: slap a bough and if you say 'damn', it's a fir) and treasured the books he did not read.
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