Boggle

[ellarien]

Apparently, I was a boy in my teenage years.

I was wandering in the campus bookstore at lunchtime (Yes, I'm still in Bozeman, but they have one here too.) I spotted a dump-bin of paperbacks in colorful retro covers; Riddle of the Sands, She, The Lost World, The 39 Steps, The Prisoner of Zenda, and The Man Who Was Thursday, with a prominent placard reading Great Books for Boys.

I read and loved at least four of those as a teen, and enjoyed the movie of another in my undiscriminating early TV years (which happened shortly after I finished grad school). And, as far as I recall, no-one ever told me I was a boy or even that I had boyish tastes.

I also did some pleasant wandering in the cool sunshine, smelling and photographing the lilacs and crab-apple blossom.

Comments

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

I'm some years older than you, of course, but when I was a child I got all my books from the 'Boys' Adventure' section in the junior library - I also occasionally had to take School stories, particularly Enid Blyton's Malory Towers out of the 'Girls' section for my kid brother.

Later, we got a SF and Fantasy section, and a pony books section... I don't know when Sheffield City Libraries stopped classifying books this way. Plainly before you started using them.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

NB:

The Man Who was Thursday - isn't that glorifying terrorism? Come to think of it, you might classify my beloved The Prisoner of Zenda there too.

[ellarien]

Yes, the Anarchists seem to have been the Terrists of their day. I've even seen that parallel drawn in modern works. (I hesitate to call the book in question literature.)

[ellarien]

As far as I remember, the children's side at Greenhill in my day had one long wall of fiction, with alcoves for younger children and non-fiction. (If there's been a ghetto for pony books, I doubt I'd have noticed.) I switched to the adult side at twelve or thirteen, though, and that definitely wasn't gender-separated, though it did have the SF separated out at one end.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

I had a feeling we might have used the same library, and we did. (I got my first set of books out the day it opened.) When I switched to adults, SF and detective were both in with the main fiction. It was much later that they were sorted out.

[ellarien]

Yes, I thought Greenhill might have been your local library too! We moved up to Bradway in 1975; it would have been round about 1977-8 that I started using the adult section, I think.

(My first library, Ecclesall, has moved into a shiny new building now, making room for a rather unlikely block of flats on the grounds of the Victorian house that used to be the library.)

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

I think it opened around 1960/61 but it might have been a year or two later or earlier.