As a child, my mother told me that I had always asked her to read me "Little Black Sambo" at night.  Gosh, that was 60 years ago, and it's long gone and out of print.

But one day, I was looking in a dumpster for a couple of boxes, and I found it - laying there looking up at me.  I snatched it up, read it twice, and I have it as the centerpiece of my book collection.   (I put it in a Ziploc)

I still don't know why I was so fascinated with that story, but iI have the original version.  It's my most precious book.

Maysied

We had  a copy of that too when I was little,  and I just loved it as a kid. 

My favorite and would love to find an orginal copy of one fish, two fish by Dr. Suess.  I taught myself to read with that book.

I still have at least one of the first books I remember reading. Not sure if I have both, but I bet I do. I always stored them together even as a child. They were The Tent and The Pond.

The other book I cling to - though I haven't read yet - is Wonder Stories Told For Children by Hans Christian Anderson. It looks older than time. The illustrations are block print... a quick google search puts it as published in 1881. It was a book I rescued from the open-air machine shed on my father's farm. Just wandering around the shed and picked it up out of a cardboard full of junk that had split open. It still has stains from pigeon shit on the cover. It is an ex-library book with the card still pasted in the back cover, "Dist. 36, Murray Co." But who knows where he got it and how it ended up in his shed - an auction? A cast off from a local church?  Even though I haven't read it yet, I love the memory of rescusing a book of fairy tales.