There’s a meme going around to list your first order from Amazon. Mine was in AUgust of 1998, and included The House of Arden and its parallel story Harding’s Luck (glad I bought those while both were in print), by E. Nesbit; Bob Dylan’s album TIme Out of Mind (meh); and both Volumes 1 and 2 of The First Fifteen Years by Bok, Muir and Trickett (probably listened to as much as any albums I own).
My next order, in October, included more books, among which was O’Brian’s Master and Commander. Another in there was the songbook Rise Up Singing, to replace my ten-year-old copy that was falling apart. A classmate on my dorm floor sophomore year had a wonderful Quaker songbook – actually, just a stack of photocopies of it – called something like Winds of the People. There was quite literal jumping up and down when I found at the Philly Folk Fest two years later that someone had revised and reissued it as Rise Up Singing, and there may have been more jumping when I learned about this second edition, which added a badly needed index.
My third order was the beginning of my Fadiman fanhood, including both Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader and Clifton Fadiman’s New Lifetime Reading Plan.
Over the years, Amazon has been very very good to me, and vice versa. They’re greatly expanded my world – and I’ve expanded their profits.