Okay, I do feel the need to comment here. This book never had a "cover" in the original hardcover edition that I could find. And the version that I read, the one that was in on family's bookshelves was this one. The spine and it's somewhat lurid title captivated me for years, but especially when I found it it was my father's favorite book. I was in 9th grade when I read it for the first time and it sparked an undying love for the Renaissance.

I still have the book, and it is decaying, the cover is falling off, the spine is dried out. I'm afraid to open it.

Growing up, my family room was filled with books. On the left side was the wall with my mom's collection of Very Special Heritage Books in their cases and the books still in their onion skin paper wrappers on the very top shelf. The next two shelves were decades worth of the quarterly editions of Reader's Digest Condensed Books. In the middle was the big family television set and no shelves because of the aerial antenna (and until I was in 7th grade, it was a black and white set!). On the right side, were all of the regular fiction books from my mother and father's reading life, mostly before they had kids, and a lot of my mother's favorites from before she was married. A lot of middle-brow fiction, a lot of non-fiction about world events. When friends came over, they were always stunned at how many books we had.

I kept a few of them when my parents sold the house, and many make this list. Books were always a part of my life.

I am thinking about books in my childhood home. My mother was a more voracious reader than my father when I was a kid. She read a lot of paperback mysteries - I think her bridge and mah-jongg friends traded with her. There were stacks of Earle Stanley Gardner in her sitting room, and there was loads of paperbacks in the basement. And I think some of them must have been my grandmother's too. Neither of them really read any romances. Although my grandmother had more middle-brow tastes -- she did introduce me, at a young-ish age, to Taylor Caldwell. Her favorite was Dear and Glorious Physician (a novel about St. Luke, and thus a very odd choice for a Jewish woman), but mine was A Pillar of Iron (about Cicero), which I read in 10th grade, when I started studying Latin.