It was at Arlington House that I first experienced intense pleasure connected with reading. In very bad weather and in the late afternoon of Sundays, the whole school sat in the big schoolroom in silence and read books which one could take out of a large cupboard, containing the “school library”. Under the gas jets, on winter evenings, a great fire burning in the huge fireplace, in the silence and comfortable fug, I suddenly found myself transported from the rather boring and always uncertain life to which one had been arbitrarily and inexplicably committed, to the strangest, most beautiful, and entrancing world of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, or The Log of the Flying Fish. There is no doubt that I then experienced some of the exquisite pleasure, some purging of the passions, that later came to me, as to Aristotle, from more orthodox literary masterpieces.

— Leonard Woolf, from Sowing

For Leonard Woolf it was Jules Verne and Harry Collingwood. For me it was the gee-whiz technology of Tom Swift, and Robert E. Howard’s bloodthirsty and brooding Conan books. And much more extensively, it was the many varied worlds of Burroughs (Edgar Rice; my interest in William S. did not develop until much later).

Burroughs’ Pellucidar series for example, where the action is set inside an improbably hollow Earth; or Carson of Venus and its sequels, swords being swashed in the towering jungles of that cloud-shrouded planet; and the more austere red planet where John Carter of Mars adventured. Even the Burroughs imitators appealed to me: the oddly named Otis Adelbert Kline prominent among them.

I loved those small Ace paperback editions of Burroughs’ books the best, with their cover paintings by Frank Frazetta, Roy G. Krenkel Jr. and others. The titles on the covers were all set in a typeface which will forever conjur up exotic worlds, swashbuckling adventure, and buxom damsels in distress (fleeing from Manchu-mustachioed or spear-waving villians, dressed all the while in scant fur garments not quite capable of containing their more-than-ample charms).

I think the titles on those small Ace paperbacks represent the first time I noticed a specific typeface as having a distinct character (by which I do not intend a pun), and I’ve often wondered what that face was called, who designed it, and whether it has yet been rendered it into Postscript Type 1 form.

In the final sentence of the quote above, though, Leonard seems too ready to put distance between himself and the “unorthodox” literary masterpieces of his youth. These were, after all, the first books to awaken in him “intense pleasure”, to “transport” him, and to “purge his passions” (from my own experience I can confirm that there’s nothing like the image of a cave girl in a fur bikini to help a hormonal teen purge his pent up passions). Why the need to (mildly) disown them later on? The more I read of Leonard Woolf’s life, the more his repudiation of these boyhood pleasures seems true to his (more than somewhat) snobbish nature. To his diminishment, I would maintain.

Back in 1995 I sat in a darkened conference room with a few hundred others, listening — rapt — while Ray Bradbury gave the keynote speech. He was like an old revival preacher, thumping the podium, holding all of us captive with his voice. He spoke of the sharp sorrow and the deep sense of loss he felt when peer pressure forced him — at age 11 or so — to repudiate his boyhood loves: Flash Gordon, Prince Valiant and their kin. And then in pure Ray Bradbury fashion he told of how he came to see the light again, and had reclaimed them: in a carnival tent soon afterwards, when Mr. Electrico had touched the young Ray with his sword, had made his hair stand up, and sparks fly out of his ears, and then had exhorted him to “Live forever!”

When Bradbury had finished speaking to us that day he received a standing ovation, and eyes were damp around the room. His words had come so purely from the heart.

And so to Leonard Woolf (if I had had the chance), and to anyone who has ever denied their own guilty reading pleasures, I would urge: Don’t repudiate them; don’t diminish their importance by a jot. For to do so is kill off something living in your soul. Yes: we all move on from the literary passions of our younger years. But these are the lower bricks in that structure built of books we add to year by year. And without that foundation we might not read with passion now at all.