My parents didn’t have quite as many books as the ones below, but we had a lot and I had a library card. There were some books that my parents set aside (“until you’re older”) they were pretty lenient about it — there were plenty of arguments with the librarian at the check-out desk, when they wanted to stifle my endless curiosity.

“I am a product […of] endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents’ interest, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass.”

– C.S. Lewis, author of The Screwtape Letters and The Chronicles of Narnia, among other things.