The Very First Was Willard Price
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The very first author I can remember reading more than one book by was Willard Price. Well, there was Roald Dahl of course, but I was helped along with those, Dr. Seuss too. Those are the sorts of books you can one day read, just as you can one day ride a bike – your parents alongside you reading those same words to start with, just as they’re there holding the bike steady and then – eventually – removing the training wheels.
But Willard Price. Man that was all me. My own discovery. I discovered him like millions of others – those books were, I guess, my Harry Potter.
I know almost nothing about Price – well, I knew almost nothing about him, should I say. Like, I didn’t know that he had died right around the time I had discovered his books in our school library. But a quick Google fixes most things these days. We didn’t have a quick Google then. We had a very slow Google at best – we called it a microfiche. And it wasn’t just us calling it that. Everyone called it that. But there was always a big queue for it at the library!
Anyway, Price – a Canadian (didn’t know that when I was reading his books) wrote this series of books for boys. Specifically for boys. Apparently. They were known as The Willard Price Adventure Series.
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I read them all – 14 of them. I didn’t quite follow the order, because some weeks someone else had the book you wanted. But I remember feeling a huge pang of sadness when I did make it through the final book in the series. No more adventures. Well, no new adventures. The sadness passed as I simply started reading the books again. And then I started to collect them – we’d share them out around friends, do swaps, borrow and return.
The adventures in these books were all based around animals and geography – around travel. As a young kid, six-seven-eight-nine, I was obsessed with learning about animals and countries. I committed capital cities to memory, the way I would – a few years on – start memorising recording dates and the names of producers and sessions players, switching the atlas for any record cover.
The adventures in these books were carried out by Hal and Roger Hunt. They were brothers, the sons of a world-renowned animal collector, John Hunt. John Hunt had taught his boys so much – and Hal (19-20, the hero, dashing, tall, handsome) and Roger (14-15, enthusiastic – very much the Robin to Hal’s Batman) knew how to handle themselves amid prides of lions, around gorillas, they stood up to slave hunters and protested against ivory traders, they battled elements in the Arctic and the Amazon, there were real safaris and even a volcano!
Each volume named after the animal or location – we start with Amazon Adventure, conclude with Arctic – in between there’s the South Sea Adventure, Underwater Adventure, Volcano Adventure, Whale Adventure, African Adventure, Elephant Adventure, Safari Adventure, Lion Adventure, Gorilla Adventure, Diving Adventure, Cannibal Adventure and Tiger Adventure.
Impossible to name one single favourite but I was thrilled by the diving in Diving Adventure, impressed by the lion in Lion Adventure and, well, you get the picture.
There were, I remember, a couple of duds. I was not quite as impressed with one or two of the volumes – I still read them multiple times and can’t tell you know which books I loved the most and which I didn’t like quite as much. But I can tell you that just a few years ago I found surviving copies of a couple of the books – and read them again. This time in a single sitting where, previously, the eight year old me, would do my best to read them each night for as long as I can, keep to a regime so that there were not overdue fines, and so I could get to the next one as soon as possible.
Yes, re-reading Amazon Adventure as an adult I finally saw how dated this was – I had no idea the book was written in 1949 when I first read it. Now it seemed about as relevant as scouting. But back then it was, well, about as cool as it could get.
I read – just now – on The Oracle (the microfiche destroyed by Wikipedia) that Price commented “shortly before his death” (well, it wasn’t going to be after now, was it…) that his aim in writing the Adventure series for young people was “to lead them to read by making reading exciting and full of adventure. At the same time I want to inspire an interest in wild animals and their behavior. Judging from the letters I have received from boys and girls around the world, I believe I have helped open to them the worlds of books and natural history”.
That is exactly what happened. It opened up, too, the world of collecting. Of cataloging – of making a list and checking it off twice, reading and re-reading, collecting up trivia and news around the item and event. The item was the book – the event was reading it. These books didn’t save my life. Nothing that corny. But they got my life of reading started. And so I have to list Willard Price as the first author I ever admired; the first to really light the fuse.
I didn’t spot any homoerotic undertones, I didn’t care about the prosaic phrasing – it was adventure those boys (Roger and Hal) craved and the adventure of reading about it was a constant thrill to me. And the best bit was that I cannot remember – at all – how I found it to these books. I don’t recall a friend or teacher taking me to the section; I don’t remember seeing someone reading them first. There wasn’t GoodReads or any recommended picks then. I found them in the best way you can ever find anything. They spoke to me. They announced themselves. They made the introduction. And though it didn’t last for life it sure felt like it at the time.
And maybe they kinda did last for life after all.
Who was the very first author you remember reading on your own and collecting, or at least completing the series?