Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini – don't know how many times. Several.

Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini – couple of times.

Lord of the Rings trilogy, preceded by The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien – three times so far (not counting watching tapes of the LOTR movies – couple of times.

The Star Kings and the sequel, Return to the Stars by Edmond Hamilton – three or four times. Hamilton wasn't all that skillful a writer and he's pretty dated as far as science fiction goes. Pure space opera. But, boy, could that sucker tell a story! The various "Star Trek" writers would have done well to have read some of Hamilton's stuff!

The Sparrow and Children of God by Mary Doria Russell – a couple of times.

Several Shakespearean plays, but I'd rather see them staged than to read them. Same with Cyrano de Bergerac by Rostand. Hard to beat Jose Ferrar's performance in the 1950 movie. First videotape I ever bought.

Wayfaring Stranger by Burl Ives – twice. Learned a lot about him that I didn't know before. He was studying to be a singer of lieder—art songs—when he suddenly realized that he already had a huge repertoire of songs that he'd learned from his grandmother and while bumming around the country, the kind of songs very few people he knew of at the time seemed to be doing. The rest is history.

The Mayor of MacDougal Street by Dave Van Ronk – I've only read it once so far, but I'm going to read it again very soon. His and my performing styles are far different, but his experiences on the East Coast and mine on the West have some fairly intriguing parallels. He says a lot that rings very large bells for me.

Old Troubadour by Gregory d'Alessio, about Carl Sandburg.   D'Alessio is an artist and cartoonist by trade (many cartoons in "The New Yorker") and an active member of the New York Classic Guitar Society. Sandburg used to stay with d'Alessio whenever he was in New York City, as did several other famous people. Sandburg was avidly interested in the classic guitar, even though his playing, including his song accompaniments, was weird, to say the least. He met Segovia at d'Alessio's pad. Segovia would offer to tune Sandburg's guitar for him before he played (self-defense, perhaps? Sandburg subscribed to the "That's close enough for folk music" theory of tuning). And he also met Marilyn Monroe at d'Alessio's place. She delighted in taking dictation from him when he had a sudden inspiration for a poem. The book is full of stories and anecdotes about Sandburg, plus many photographs and a lot of d'Alessio's sketches and cartoons of Sandburg. I didn't even know of the book's existence until Bob (Deckman) Nelson gave me a copy. Thanks again, Bob!

There are a number of others that don't immediately spring to mind.

I presume that we're not asking about books that we don't necessarily pick up and read straight through, at least more than once, like dictionaries and encyclopedias, or things like Strunk and White's Elements of Style, but refer to with some frequency. I have shelf after shelf of non-fiction on history, science, political theory, various biographies and autobiographies, and a whole bunch of reference books that I grab pretty often, not to mention song books up the ziggy, including collections like Sharp's English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians, several books by the Lomaxes, Sandburg, books about the folk music scene such as David Hajdu's Positively 4th Street, Jack Holtzman's Follow the Music, bios and autobios of Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Jean Ritchie and others—the usual stuff. Plus the F. J. Child collection on CD-ROM. I've read most of these and refer to them frequently, but I presume this is not really what the question is about.

Perhaps in that same catagory are collections of comic strips and cartoons, such as old "Flash Gordon," "Buck Rogers," "Prince Valiant," "Peanuts," and "Calvin and Hobbes," and such.

Between my wife, Barbara (who is also a book-freak—and a librarian) and me, we have so many bookshelves lining the walls that if the walls were ever to collapse and fall out, we'd probably not be aware of it.

Don Firth