Bruce

This is a photo of me standing in front of the bookshelves that hold old books and family memorabilia. Behind me are lots of old books from four generations. They look like they have fancy bindings, but books of my grandparents' era had a lot of chemicals in the paper, and disintegrate easily. Like me, they bought for value, not for quality. I think it is funny that I saved a book from my childhood called "Bruce" about a collie, written by Albert Payson Terhune (Grosset & Dunlap, 1920), never imagining someday it would be my name.

The shiny white, blue and green box on the far left of the 5th shelf contained a card catalog of my grandparents' library, assembled by several members of the family when they were closing up their home after their deaths in the 1960s. This list of books, found by me in the late 1980s, launched several publishing projects, including a spin off into agricultural magazines used by farm families in the early 20th century and women who wrote for Ohio farm magazines in the 19th century.

You can barely see the top shelf, but that holds children's books, some old, some from my childhood--mostly horse stores--and some I purchased because I liked the illustrations (from the days when I wanted to write a children's book). I've done some rearranging of my magazine collection on the lower 2 shelves (premiere issue collection), but these shelves stay pretty much the same.

"From a fuzzy and adventurous fluff-ball of gray-gold-and-white fur, Bruce swiftly developed into a lanky giant. He was almost as large again as is the average collie pup of his age; but, big as he was, his legs and feet and head were huge, out of all proportion to the rest of him. . . seemed totally lacking in sense, as well as in bodily coordination. He was forever getting into needless trouble. He was a storm-center. No one but a born fool--canine or human--could possible have caused one-tenth as much bother."

With that, we know this dog has to turn out to be a hero, right? Wins a medal for bravery in WWI.

Wayne Public Library in Wayne, NJ, has the Albert Payson Terhune Collection with photos of Terhune and his collies of Sunnybank, known as The Place in the book.