How Long Have You Had Your Earliest Book?

Was having a long (and most interesting) chat the other day with a friend who happens to be an internationally respected book collector and subject-matter expert, and the conversation shifted to the age of our personal collections.

First book I bought for myself that I still own; the whole series
is great, and I re-read these every 18 months or so...

Which made me think about how old the oldest of my books are. I'm not talking absolute age here (I have a handful of books that are over a century old, and at least a couple that are approaching their 200th birthdays) but rather how long they've been mine. This made me think—or at least try to think—back to my early reading years, and to how I bought books for myself.

The earliest books I bought for myself I bought through the Scholastic Book Club (still a thing; who knew?); their titles have faded into the mist, but as a child and adolescent most of my reading was done courtesy the Calgary Public Library and the libraries of my elementary, junior high and high schools.*

Which means the first books I purchased that I still own I bought when I was in my late teens and early twenties. So I've had one or two of these for about half a century. (That's a sobering thought, as if we were in need of any of those right now.) None of these oldest books is fiction, by the way. My guess is that the earliest fiction still in my collection was acquired in the mid-1970s; the first purchase date I can confirm is 1979.

For what it's worth, all of these first books are connected in terms of subject matter: the oldest of my non-fiction is a set of reference books (from Blandford Press) about military aircraft of (and between) the two world wars, with a close second belonging to a group of glossy reference books about movies (mostly musicals). And the oldest-purchased fiction I still own is by Donald Jack, featuring that most Canadian of protagonists, Bartholomew Bandy, in both war and peace and the movie business.

Lorna and I have sold off a lot of our mutual collection over the past decade, but there are some things we will never get rid of. And in terms of age of acquisition, there's nothing in my collection as comes close to the book Lorna gave me to read last month: her copy of Andre Norton's The Stars Are Ours! is the original Ace paperback, obtained by her from her grandmother...

...back in 1958. She was a precocious child, all right.

*And all praise to my parents, who very early on inculcated in me the habit of regular trips to the library, from which I always emerged with stacks of books. I continue this behaviour today, and the majority of the 314 books I read in 2021 came from the Toronto Public Library.