Cogburn posts them all

Inspired by my posting of the cover of the original 1980 version of The Monster Manual, COGBURN POSTS several of the main book covers.

It might sound silly to some people, but those big thick D & D books were, for many of us, our first encounter with “intellectual” books. It was a game, of course. But incorporated into that game was much world mythology. The game was also complicated enough that you often had to think pretty hard to keep the whole system up and running. And finally, though the late GARY GYGAX would probably appear to my adult self as a bit of a name-dropper given to unnecessarily obscure vocabulary words, much of my adult English vocabulary was, in fact, learned from Gygax. I learned words like “antithesis” from the Dungeon Master’s Guide, for example, and I doubt I’m alone. Coming at an age when I simply wasn’t doing any normal school homework whatsoever, the game was surely the major pillar of my early adolescent intellectual life.

Actually there was one other pillar, also highly respected by many Americans in my age group, and that was the baseball writer BILL JAMES, now a Boston Red Sox team consultant. I still think James has a phenomenal mind, and his style of breaking down problems in creative ways left a permanent impact on me and others who went on to different vocations. I started reading James in 1982, at age 14, a couple of years prior to philosophy per se. He yanked me out of the intellectual doldrums to some extent. There was a period of a number of years, say from ages 10 to 14, when I simply wasn’t reading anything anymore. I can’t really remember what I was doing during that period except playing video games and watching sports.

(Oh yes, the word “creative”… That was apparently another of those annoying coinages that has since become a normal word. An older teacher of mine was still scoffing at the word when I met him in 1987. His scoffing was violent enough –someone else had used it in his presence, not me– that I don’t think I ever used it again until just now in this post.)