As a fledgling cinephile in the early 1970s, there were more books than I could possibly read… not that the notion stopped me from picking up as many as I could.  When I say “picking up” I’m not just employing lazy vernacular… some books I literally swiped.  From 1974-1976, I was a day student at The Rectory School in Connecticut.  I wasn’t happy there – every teacher had an edge that I was unused to seeing in an adult not half in the bag and the boarding students dumped by their parents were borderline sociopaths.  It wasn’t a thrilling chapter in the serial of my life but I got through it by diving into movies and books about movies… one of which was Danny Pirie’s A Heritage of Horror: The English Gothic Cinema 1946-1972 (Equinox Books, 1973)..  I had grown up on Hammer horrors, whose “Dracula” and “Frankenstein” series taught me the power of resilience, silence and glowering resentment.  When I found the Pirie book in the Rectory library, I rationalized that nobody else would want it as much as I did.  The slim paperback was full of pictures from films I would spend the next 30 years tracking down:  Arthur Crabtree’s Horrors of the Black Museum (1959), Hammer’s Plague of the Zombies (1966) and Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General (1968)… to name a few.  Those titles!  Those pictures!  I was hooked.   

A couple of books that I received legitimately bear mentioning.  In 1973, my sister Cheri gave me Denis Gifford’s A Pictorial History of Horror Movies (Hamlyn Publishing Group, 1973).  I knew of Gifford from his Boris Karloff book but even if he had been a stranger this was like the doors of perception being blown off their hinges.  With this big book open in my lap, I had access to such a world of horrors that I had never imagined… from America, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and the Philippines.  It was from Gifford that I learned the names of Edgar Wallace (my favorite author) and Tod Slaughter (my favorite actor) and I remain eternally grateful for his stewardship.   

Like Gifford, William K. Everson was British,
but way snootier—and that made reading his Classics of the Horror Film (Citadel Press, 1974) educational and fun.  Everson’s asides of high dudgeon over the failing of a particular title made reading him sort of like being chided by Mr. French from A Family Affair—you enjoyed his fits of pique but you knew in your heart that there was no such thing as a bad horror movie.  (I regret to report that my opinion has changed over the years.)  The Everson book was one of the first I bought upon joining The Movie-Entertainment Book Club in 1974 and I still have my original.  I don’t pull these books out as often as I should… but my daughter does.  At 17 months, she enjoys the challenge of removing my books from the bookcase no matter how tightly I pack them together.  She will even sit with the books open in her lap, slowly turning the pages and drinking in the visuals, just like her Dad used to do. 

If I can teach her to reshelf, we’ll have a groovy thing going on.