The Roessleville Elementary School library is a mixture of muted blue and gray metal shelves and similar colored carpet in my memory. I’ve already talked about how bad I am with colors, so one of you corrects me to neon purple and black in actuality, I acknowledge my error.  My relationship to the physical recall of the space comes mostly from formative early years, so while I’m sure the shelves werre actually no more than five or 6 feet high they seemed to reach the sky. Beyond those meager details, I cannot trust that this particular library hasn’t been blended in with almost every other library I’ve ever visited into one amalgamation.

The distinct memory I have is of the one (or two?) times a year that the library would host the Scholastic Book Fair. For a few days, every flat surface in their would be covered with books we could handle and browse to get our little brains excited about buying books for home. I think we could go before school, or at lunch, and we definitely went as a class. We had a magazine sized catalog to pick from, in addition to all the copies we had greased with our PBJ stained hands.  I distinctly remember the tiny print and check boxes on the order form. 

I rummaged through my memory for “the first book I ever bought“. When I Google search the likely candidate, it’s publication date was 1980. I probably got books from the book fair earlier than that with mom’s help, in fact writing this brings a Clifford the Big Red Dog book to mind. But the book I can see in my mind, titled The Watchers of Space,  is perhaps the first, or certainly a first, book I got without adult input. I had it on my shelf at home for years, along with my collected Hardy Boys books. It was a science fiction book, in which a boy and girl on an interstellar space ship receive help from the constellations Orion the Hunter and Cygnus the Swan to reach their new home, overcoming the obstacles of a generically evil space squid monster. I can see the drawn cover with the ship and it’s big habitat ring, and the hunter’s bow and graceful swan. A field of stars. One of the watchers dies, aiding the kids; I think that was the first time I cried alone reading a book.

The publish date of the book is predated by both the Battlestar Galactica original and Buck Rogers television series. I saw Star Wars in theaters in ‘77. I’m almost certain I bought the book because I’d already seen those. It’s likely I judged the book by it’s cover.   I’m going to guess that this book was the first sci-fi “novel” (it was probably the same size as a goose bumps or babysitters club book) that I remember reading.  It’s safe to say it was a formative moment for me as a sci-fi reader.