Although Elm Street has long since lost its trees to disease and its fine old homes are dental clinics, cleaners, barber and beauty shops, or mortuaries now—their spacious front porches nailed meanly shut or glass-bricked up like bars, their large lawns little parking lots, their façades at night lit by a loud, harsh, pearly light—its name still stands for a past that was energetic and objective, like Freight Street and Brewery and Court; so even if Memory Lane and Happy Hollow date like dresses, and we can place them in their period the way we can calendar kids called Ozzie or girls named Cheryl, the sort of history they contain refers exclusively to states of mind, to fads and furbelows, to illusions, and points only at the people who chose them, and never toward the things or persons they stand for: not at MarJean, the timid little math whiz, or Junior James, the football star, or Fat Freddie, the schoolyard bully, but to their thoughtless, arrogant, tasteless parents.

I would return over the slow roll of the hill about as rapidly as the shade did, prolonging my liberty and my pleasure. About halfway home there was a drugstore which kept a stock of Pocket Books in a round wire rack, and I would spend my final twenty-five cents on Lost Horizon, which had been published as #1 and therefore honored above the rest, or on a heavy red-edged tome like An Outline of History, thick as a steak, or on The Story of Mankind, one of the earliest. These glistening little books stole the breath. Their covers were made from a kind of cellophane which had been bonded to the cardboard, and this created a surface so protective you could safely set down on it a sweating glass, although the dye they’d used to stain the edges of the pages would redden a warm palm; and in time, too, the cellophane would loosen and be sloughed off like old skin. Still, the type was crisp and sprightly, the paper didn’t yellow, the backs cracked only occasionally, the print of the previous page left a pleasant afterimage the way the chocolate lingered in my mouth, and the books could be collected like baseball cards or bottle caps or stamps. I desired a full set in the worst way, and I fed my quarters into the series as though it were a slot; but, of course, the enterprise expanded quickly from its first ten toward its first hundred, so finally I had to call a halt (at #92, The Pocket Bible, I remember), and with that decision I lost all hunger for completeness despite the fact I still had gaps (The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, for instance). At least wouldn’t have to purchase #107, The Pocket Book of Etiquette, which had been announced. The cost of my hobby had also risen with the enlargement of the published line, and required an increasing number of small thefts—loose change from pockets, sugar crocks, and drawers—which I feared were finally being noticed, and suspicious watches set.