Dec 20, 2015 6 min read

Fifty-four years ago this month I bought my first books. Stop the presses!

Seriously, they were among the best purchases I ever made.

It’s a bummer the same opportunity no longer exists.

I’ll explain.

I don’t remember the moment I plunked down my money at a school book fair for the books. I do remember, however, what prompted me: a budding interest in politics and history and an abiding interest in baseball.

(Now that’s discouraging: these remain topics of surpassing interest to me. How little I’ve changed and grown! How predictable! The flip side is that I’ve certainly been consistent.)

The date was Dec. 15, 1961. (The date is stamped on the inside of my purchases.)

I was a kid of 13. An eighth grader at the old North Union Junior High School on Coolspring Street in Uniontown.

In one case, I didn’t know what I was buying. I thought it was a biography of Franklin Roosevelt. Sometime after bringing it home I realized it was a collection of his speeches as president with an introduction by some obscure (to me) guy by the name of Harry Hopkins.

The book is titled “Nothing To Fear,” and I still have it.

I have another of the books I bought on that frigid (I’m only guessing about that) December day in 1961. It was a biography of Ted Williams, by a famous sportswriter of the day Ed Linn, called “The Eternal Kid.”.

The FDR and the Williams books combined cost $1.25.

They are small-size paperbacks — the dimension of today’s paperback romance novels that you see in drugstores and at Wal-Mart.

Once upon a time you could buy good books — histories, biographies, serious fiction — in that size. They were wonderful. You could put them in your back pocket and tote them everywhere. They were cheap.

I remember buying paperbacks off the rack at the Uniontown News store on Morgantown Street for half a buck, money even I could afford. (My Aunt Ruth and Uncle Vince slipped me money probably every week of my young life.)

If only you could buy good books like that now. Today’s quality paperbacks are both larger — the size of hardbacks- and much more expensive — $15-and-up expensive.

If I were young today, I couldn’t afford to read.

So what was available back then and what was the cost?

A look inside the upstairs bookcase reveals:

“Just Friends And Brave Enemies” by Robert Kennedy (written when he was attorney general), 50¢; “The Strategy of Peace” by John F. Kennedy, 50¢ (the Kennedys worked cheap); “The Public Philosophy” by Walter Lippmann, 60¢.

“Majesty And Mischief” (about FDR) by William S. White, 60¢; “A Pocket History Of The United States” by Allan Nevins and Henry Steele Commager, 60¢; “Profiles In Courage” by John F. Kennedy (I’m sensing a trend here), 65¢; “The Origins Of The Second World War” by A.J.P. Taylor, 75¢.

“John F. Kennedy President” (there, the trend confirmed) by Hugh Sidey, 75¢; “The Affluent Society” by John Kenneth Galbrath, 75¢; “Winston Churchill, The Valiant Years” by Jack Le Vien and John Lord, 75¢; “When The Cheering Stopped” by Gene Smith, 95¢.

By the mid-60s, prices were rocketing out of control. Catherine Drinker Bowen’s “Miracle At Philadelphia” cost a whopping $1.95. By the time 1966 rolled around the cost of “The Proud Tower” by Barbara Tuchman was $3.50, although this may have had something to do with the fact that Tuchman was the Doris Kearns Goodwin of her day.

It’s a shame that inexpensive paperbacks like these are no longer around. An awful lot of kids are missing out. The experience I had with well-written, worthwhile books is simply unavailable to them. Publishers, it seems to me, discontinued the line in the 1970s or 1980s.

Is there any hope of revival? Probably not. Nay, for sure.

Too bad. I remember how exciting it was to walk out of the newsstand with the books under my arm. The anticipation of reading about the men who made the Constitution (“Miracle At Philadelphia”) or about the exhilarating, sad, last years of Woodrow Wilson (“When The Cheering Stopped”) is something that has never left me.

And it’s not like these books belong to the deep, dark past. I recently re-read “The Proud Tower,” Tuchman’s narrative about the years that immediately preceded World War I — years that were both golden and darkened by the approach of a world crisis whose influence is still with us. (The current map of the Middle East was drawn in the wake of that war.)

These paperback classics contain some of the best writing I have encountered in a half-century-plus of reading. Gene Smith’s description of the welcome accorded President Wilson by the people of Paris in 1919 makes you want to stand up and cheer yourself.

“It seemed like the whole of France stood on the streets. … Never, even on Armistice Day, had such cheers been heard. From the windows poured roses, violets, forget-me-nots, holly, greens. The people screamed in holy fervor to the man standing in the Victoria and holding outstretched his tall hat. …”

Hot dog, that’s some writing.

And there are lessons still to be learned in the pages of these aging paperbacks.

Recently, I unshelved “American Diplomacy” by the great George Kennan, who was not only “present at the creation” but wrote the script, while at the State Department, as to how the Cold War would run its dangerous course.

Kennan, drawing lessons from the awful blood-letting of World War I, writes this in “American Diplomacy,” and see if it doesn’t strike a nerve.

“… I suspect that what purports to be public opinion in most countries … with popular government is often not the consensus of the feelings of the mass of people at all but rather the expressions of … politicians, commentators and publicity seekers … people who live by their ability to draw attention to themselves. ..

“… So the chauvinists of all times and places go their appointed way: plucking the easy fruits, reaping the little triumphs of the day at the expense of someone else tomorrow, deluging in noise and filth anyone who gets in their way, dancing their reckless dance on the prospects for human progress, drawing the shadow of a great doubt over democratic institutions.

“And until peoples learn to spot the fanning of mass emotions and the sowing of the seeds of bitterness, suspicion and intolerance as crimes … and perhaps the greatest disservice that can done to the cause of popular government — this sort of thing will continue to occur.”

Just think, the cost for such wisdom was just 60¢.

Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — “Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation” and “Our People.” He can be reached at grandsalutebook@gmail.com.