Comic book ads used to urge kids to be the first on their block to own something:  a decoder ring, X-ray specs, sea monkeys.  I may never have been the first kid on my block to own anything cool but I was the only kid on my block to have his own library.  I’m not talking about a shelf of bedtime pabulum like Pat the Bunny and Goodnight Moon —I’m talking about a film book library. 

I was unusual.  I don’t know how I got that way but unusual I was by age 12 or 13 and unusual I stayed.  I had a tent in the backyard (not a pup tent but a real canvas tent with a TV hookup) where I did a lot of my reading.  Over time, mold would claim many of my best books but until then I was a happy and film-literate camper.   One of the first film books to make a difference was Frank Manchel’s Terrors of the Screen (Prentice-Hall, 1970) checked out of the local library.  It was illustrated with stills from genre films from George Méliès A Trip to the Moon (1902) to Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968).  I was fascinated by one picture of Christopher Lee, frozen in a rhapsody of vampiric agony as the sun’s rays scorched his undead flesh, from Horror of Dracula (1958).  I used my Mom’s Instamatic camera to take a picture of this picture so that I could own it forever… but it came back out-of-focus and I learned the value of primary sources. 

From the library of the high school where my Dad was principal I borrowed An Illustrated History of the Horror Film (Capricorn Books, 1967), by Carlos Clarens.  A more ambitious book than Manchel’s overview, this offered a full history and a wealth of glossy illustrations that really communicated the funereal texture of such (to my eyes) unseen wonders as James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon (1958) and two different versions of Dante’s Inferno that seemed to be cast with wall-to-wall naked women.  I don’t remember if I kept that book on permanent loan-out or got my own copy but I carried it around like a Bible until it rotted in my hands like… well, like Christopher Lee at the end of Horror of Dracula.   

Boris Karloff’s death in February of 1969 marked my first celebrity passing.  I didn't really understand the ramifications of death but, at the tender age of 8, I knew intuitively that Karloff (whom I had seen in an episode of The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.) was gone and that he wasn't coming back.  I guess I got a little obsessed with this dead old man and made my Mother buy me a copy of The Frankenscience Monster (Ace Publishing Corp., 1969), a chapbook of remembrances and lists of Karloff credits edited by Forest J. Ackerman.  It, too, was illustrated… I loved me my illustrations.  I read that one into the ground and still have my original copy (pictured at the right).

A few years later my sister Cheri gave me Denis Gifford’s Karloff: The Man, The Monster, The Movies (Curtis Books, 1973), a critical filmography covering all of the late actor’s film appearances with full credits, blurbs from the press of the day and synopses for each movie.  I lived the cliché of the kid reading under the covers with a flashlight as I battled childhood insomnia by poring over those stories.  Reading the scenarios in thumbnail fashion showed me that the ends of movies were set motion by the beginnings… a radical thought for my 12-year-old brain.  I didn’t know it then, but I was teaching myself the craft of storytelling. 

To be continued…