One of my recent Cape Breton posts mentions the the Oxford Dictionary my family bought when I was but a child 🙂 It was grocery story lure – buy a section each week or spend so much & get the next section free. In the days before points cards this was popular along with green stamps. You’d get so many stamps with each purchase, paste them into books just for that purpose & when you had enough redeem them for stuff like dolls, kitchen gadgets.
On my books shelves I have two sets of books collected as supermarket promotions. One is ‘The Bible Story Library – Four volumes – 1956 -Educational Book Guild – New York.’ Lavishly illustrated with original vibrant color pictures, plus endless etching from the likes of Dore, plus murky photos of other religious art. I can remembering during over the etching that provided a pre-teen me with glimpses of nude men & women struggling in the Flood, or sprawled out in various battle scenes. Looking at it today I’m amazed the great six-packs so many of these guys had.
The set I have isn’t my original. I don’t remember what became of it. It didn’t turn up the boxes of my books that my Dad had stored away when I moved out. (Those boxes contained lots of Tom Swift Jr, & Hardy Brothers) I remember my second summer here in Toronto – 1979 – I had been wondering what happened to those books. Shortly after that I went in a huge sale an action house was having. endless boxes of books all over the parking lot and & found Volume 2 in one of the boxes. After about an hour of searching I found all four volumes.
The other set is ‘The Golden Book Encyclopedia – sixteen volumes – 3rd printing – 1960 – some (c)1940 – Golden Press – New York.’ Another lavishly illustrated set of books. I loved the hyper-real covers on each volume. The content was written for children & so hasn’t aged well 🙂 The illustrations are wonderful though, some in a campy way, but all well executed. I loved reading these when I was on the can.
My originals became quite tattered from use & abuse. I can’t recall very using them to research anything for school. The set I have now is not my original set but one which I ‘inherited’ from a friend who was moving & asked if I might be interested. When I was asked I had no idea what encyclopedia set it was but I said yes & I was delighted it was this particular one from my childhood.
These all come from Sobeys in Sydney. They also offered cooking sets, dishes, the same way – buy a different piece each week. There was once a set Classical Masterpieces lps, a set of geography books, but I don’t think my folks bought these. 
Unswearing In Ceremony
how can I unswear allegiance
to my heart mind
to my body hormones
each time I think this is it
there’s another time
you hold your hand to my heart
you swear you’ll change
that reform is possible
my head tells me
you will never hold true to this vow
I smile & keep that to myself
knowing better and doing better
are such different things
as much as I know better
doing you is better than not doing you
there is the paradox of an oath
I never took
never signed
never swore to you
unconsciously I have taken it
to be accepting forgiving
not to make plans
when I know you will never fulfill
even the simplest promise
of texting when you say you’d text
your dedication to the job
takes priority over your personal life
in fact it is your escape from it
that job is your bottle
you can’t help yourself
it blots out everything outside of it
even when you are told not to be there
you are there to tie up loose ends
that tie you up for days on end
I’m trying to swear off you
no more of this bullshit
while a part of me rather likes
getting caught up
in this hurt slightly martyred feeling
which has a certain sweet reward all of its own
I can pine at a window
hoping the car driving down the street is yours
when I know very well it’ll never be yours
having texts
to long for
has a tang of romance
of humanness
lets me feel less self contained & distant
wishing there was something I could do
but all I can alter is myself
you are an addict
the grace that’ll reach you
could work through me
but I’m not holding my breath
soon
I may not even be holding my hand
out to you
except to wave good bye
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