My name is John, and I’m an addict. I’m hooked on words. I’m a reading junkie.

It all started when I was a kid growing up in Philadelphia row house. My mother decorated with piles of books on every table, on the piano, on the floor. She subscribed to Reader’s Digest condensed books, bought other books, and was a frequent borrower from our neighborhood branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia, one of Benjamin Franklin’s contributions to the betterment of western civilization.

In fact, when the downtown library powers that be wanted to move our branch out of walking distance (a key consideration for us since no one in the family drove), my mother one was of the leaders in a community uprising that ended up with the library getting larger quarters near where it had been before.

When other kids were playing outside during summer vacation, I was participating in the library’s reading programs that gave you prizes for the number of books you read. We subscribed to a couple of children’s book clubs that brought historical biographies to the house each month along with books and newspapers that were sold through the school.

The bottom line was that I had my nose in a book much of every day. If we went someplace, I always had a book with me to occupy me on the way and if we had some down time. I would never argue that I was well-rounded or had good social skills with other kids at that time. In fact, all that reading kept me from improving in other activities like sports, and created a barrier some times between me and the other kids.

But it also opened worlds to me that I otherwise never would have known about. And it set the stage for lifetime learning.

I have always been a proponent of what has been called a "liberal education" and the notion that the most important thing in a rapidly changing world is to know how to find information and what to do with it once you’ve found it. In high school, I would go to the large, ornate, marbled main branch of the library on Benjamin Franklin Parkway to do research for papers I was writing. That branch was so big that elements of the collection were housed together in their own separate rooms. Going there, I was in word-junkie heaven.

The library was not only for scholarly research. It was there, also, that I learned to dance. Or at least learned what ballroom dancing was supposed to be all about. The library had Arthur Murray books with diagrams of footprints that showed the steps men and women were to take in doing a fox trot or waltz and jitterbug. I tried to commit them to memory in hopes that my feet would do what my eyes had seen. It turned out my feet weren’t as learned as my eyes and brain and it really helps to have a partner and to practice. But Arthur Murray at least got me started and gave me a basic understanding of what needed to be practiced.

In later years I have been all over the open stacks at the State Library in Harrisburg and all over the many Internet sites that I now use for research for stories that I write for a number of periodicals. Although the format may change from words on paper to words on a screen, the principle is still the same—words that take me places and give me information that I otherwise would not have and might not even imagine.

As a writer who started his career as a wire service reporter, I have a particular fondness for the printed word. I love actual books (as opposed to the virtual kind). I like to see the various typefaces that are used and the different bindings. I used to belong to two book clubs and would order one or more books each month. And, in tribute to the piles of books all over my childhood home, I would never throw any of my books away or even pass them on to anyone else.

My hoarding of books came to an end when I remarried in 1986 and we were working to combine the contents of two houses into the place we had bought. It soon became apparent that even though the new house was very large, it wasn’t going to be able to accommodate the more than 30 big cartons of books that I had packed. One of the hardest decisions I had to make was to not take those books with me. I’ve continued to winnow the collection over the years and now have reached the point that I rarely will buy a new book because I already have more waiting to read than I can probably get to in the remainder of this life.

Interestingly, the commitment I made to my wife to not build permanent piles of books in the living room has led me to rediscover the library and to use it to borrow books and then return them for someone else to savor.

From time to time we hear reports that words and books are on their way out in favor of the images that we see on television and on our computers. But I don’t buy it. I think there will always be a need for words to explain things in greater detail than images can, and to provide perspective and make sense out of the images we see.

One reason I have faith that printed words will continue to have a major place in our lives is the young son of friends of ours. Recently, I have found myself wondering what he looks like. It’s hard to tell because he always has his face buried in a book. We’ve been out to dinner with them and his parents have to nag him to eat because he’s busy reading a baseball story and can’t be bothered with the food on his plate. I don’t speak up, but I’m quietly cheering for him because I know that in the words on the pages in front of him, he’s found much more for his life than the nutritional content of a hamburger and fries. The food fills his stomach, but the words fill his mind and his spirit and transport him to places unimagined by the rest of us. And it doesn’t get much better than that.