When I turned 10, my parents gave me this book– Hans Christian Anderson Fairy Tales illustrated by Jiří Trnka (published by Hamlyn Publishing Group Ltd, ©1959, 1972).  My father had purchased it at the Vancouver Airport.  I remember so clearly being woken up, with breakfast on a tray and receiving the book.  The $4.95 in pencil marked on the inside.  It smelled of that glorious new book smell.

I loved (and still love) this book so much– so enthralled by the stories and the illustrations.  The book was not my first, but it is my most memorable.  I promised myself  on my 10th birthday that I would collect myself a library.  My parents were always so supportive of the love of reading and never said no to book shopping.

And so, after multiple moves across the Atlantic back and forth, multiple homes, multiple life challenges, multiple spaces, multiple bookshelves… I kept my promise and still live surrounded by my beloved growing library of books.

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library. – Jorge Luis Borges

Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. – Carl Sagan

I know each and everyone of them, read or not.

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