to my 850 followers good bye

Judging a book by it's cover? I have read my books by many lights, hoarding their beauty, their wit or wisdom against the dark days when I would have no book, nor a place to read. I have known hunger of the belly kind many times over, but I have known a worse hunger: the need to know and to learn. Once, when hitchhiking, I was picked up by a professor from some small college. He noticed I carried a book in my coat pocket, and was curious. It was a Modern Library edition, in the limp bindings they used to have, which sold at the time for 95 cents. This one contained Nietzsche's Ecce Homo, and The Birth of Tragedy. The professor was a pedantic man of limited imagination and seemed almost offended that I was reading such a book. (I suspected after a few minutes' conversation that he had not read it himself.) He plied me with questions. Obviously I did not fit some category in which he decided I belonged, and when he dropped me off in town, I suspect he was relieved to be rid of me. He kept asking me why I wanted to read such a book. At first, he doubted I was reading it. Where had I heard of Nietzsche? When I told him I thought it was in the preface to a book on Schopenhauer, he was even more disturbed and probably believed I was lying. Fortunately, there seem to be few of his kind, and my subsequent friendships with university professors have proved exciting, stimulating, and fun. Perhaps I was fortunate in that the first group I met was at the University of Oklahoma in the 1930's. At that time I met Kenneth C. Kaufman, Ben Botkin, Walter Stanley Campbell (who also wrote as Stanley Vestal), Carl Coke Rister, Paul Sears, and others. Sears had just written Deserts on the March, one of the very first books on ecology, when that word was scarcely known. I believe also that the book was the first best seller to come from a university press. Stuart Chase followed it a bit later with Rich Land, Poor Land, also on the subject, in 1936. Having been over a lot of country I had seen what was happening to the land, and was pleased to get a chance to review Sears's book for a farm magazine. Ecology had been getting into some of my stories, principally one titled "Merrano of the Dry Country." It appeared in a pulp magazine and dealt not only with proper usage of the land but with the race question. That story first appeared about forty years ago, or a bit more. You can find all of Louis L'Amour's reading lists at: louislamourslosttreasures.co…