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Hamilton Arts & Letters
You will recall in Part One of this series that I described how I quietly became hooked by what Nicholas A. Basbanes entitled his book on collecting: A Gentle Madness.
As a child in Scotland there was no television, few telephones, no computers or other distractions, and not a lot of money for non-essentials, but something children had in abundance was imagination.
At home we always had books through which I could escape into another world; books such as Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and later the James Bond books by Ian Fleming. At the time, though, books were read and discarded. It was much later in life that I started collecting books, and that was by happenstance, serendipity, or more correctly, by accident. My wife Shirley picked up a rather battered book she thought I might like entitled In Search of Scotland by E.V. Morton, published originally by Methuen in 1929.
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