An acquaintance with books and learning was not a thing that a frontier boy like Powell could take for granted; he had to seize it as he could. Abe Lincoln said it for every such boy with brains and dreams in his head: “The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is a man who'll git me a book I ain't read.”
—Wallace Stegner(“Beyond the Hundredth Meridian”, p. 11)
I recently acquired a gently used hardcover edition of A Gamut of Games written by Sid Sackson and published by Castle Books of New York in 1969, the year I was born. The dust jacket shows some wear, but below that thin veneer everything else is in remarkably good shape. The book is beautifully laid out. Its text is surrounded by wide margins. Its font size doesn't strain my aging eyes. Its thick sheets of paper provide assurance that its pages may be handled and—in spite of their approaching golden anniversary of being bound in holey gatherings—appear almost as bright as I imagine they were the day they first absorbed ink off metal type in some mystic press in New York. No less than Martin Gardner boldly asserts, on the front of the dust jacket, that A Gamut of Games is “. . . the most important book on games to appear in decades . . . a splendid, diversified collection of remarkable, intellectually-stimulating indoor games . . . written in a clear, informal style by the country's leading game inventor . . . a genuine milestone in the literature of both games and mathematical recreations . . . an absolute must for all game buffs.”
Now might be a good time to confess that book herding has become yet another hobby of mine. I never intended it to be. Books just keep appearing, year after year. Their numbers have increased beyond my capacity to carry them all. So I succumb to pressures inevitably produced by population growth. I cull unfortunate selections. But I try not to acquire new ones willy-nilly, since money wasted on transient books is money that could have been applied toward the purchase of more enduring ones.
If I want you to ‘git’—by hook or by crook—a copy of a book, it's because I believe that book is worth a lot more than its lean list price, to say nothing of the steal it may be if you can find a nice used one for sale. I hope that you too become a collector of books (even just a few is fine) and that the ones you treasure most will be like friends to you. Good friends are rare and shouldn't be cast aside. Come back to your best ones again and again. Listen when they speak. And never reject a new one, just because he or she seems different somehow.
Here’s a whiff of A Gamut of Games.
John Spurgeon
