Clothes, the old saw goes, make the man (or the person). Books, perhaps, help make (or shape) the mind. In that regard, when it comes to choosing one's mental companions, it is often true that new books are easy to love. They're fresh-faced, pretty young things, with their whole life stretching out before them. To borrow from John Patrick Shanley, they're like moonlight in a martini: elusive, intriguing, and captivating. Old books, like the rich, are different; one need only spend a few hours in a used book store to realize that it may well take an act of the will to love the brittle pages and lifeless covers of ages past.

Like many fellow travelers, I have loved and left many books of both varieties. I have purged my shelves of many former compatriots over the years, abandoning them to the care of the strangers at the local thrift store or the patrons of the occasional garage sale. I have also benefited greatly from the purges of others, be it the rare garage sale find, the worthy used item, or an outright gift.

Years ago, I received a box of books: a virtually complete paperback set of the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, along with a few other nuggets of early 20th-century science fiction (Buck Rogers in the 25th Century and the books of Otis Albert Kline, for example). The box also included a slew of military books, with subjects such as the battle of Stalingrad and the Flying Tigers.

I loved those books. To be sure, Burroughs had a tendency to become repetitive, somewhat like the westerns of Louis L'Amour (and speaking as someone who will actually cop to having read every one of L'Amour's books except Bendigo Shafter, I believe I am a worthy witness to this truth). But Burroughs could also be quite entertaining; to this day I still remember Tarzan Triumphant, undoubtedly my favorite Tarzan novel, and The Mad King, which is one of those ubiquitous "I'm a king with a royal double I never knew about" stories that were probably less of a cliché a century ago than they are today. As for Kline - well, his take on the whole "let's have a guy go to another planet and become king of the aliens and beat up the evil overlords" genre was actually a load of fun, albeit somewhat derivative of Burroughs' more successful John Carter books (or Carson Napier of Venus, for that matter).