Have you seen me?

We collected the books — especially the pretty orange-bound ones — with a passion that would envy Pokeman. We treated them like gold. We would spend hours reading them over and over, loan them to each other, and let our youthful fantasies roam from the depths of the sea to the depths of outer space. How often we dreamed that we were Tom Swift, and were the driving force behind those marvelous adventures!

In fact, I credit Tom Swift with being my inspiration for entering the science and technical fields. Fictitious though he was, and wearing that ridiculous crew cut that I couldn't stand on myself, he became my role model. And a sound one, at that.

Unfortunately, I never collected all the books. I didn't have the spending money that my buddies did, and so I left childhood with perhaps a dozen of them, if that many, because some were destroyed in a fire. Then the shades of darkness fell upon the world and they went out of print. The day that Tom Swift died. For years, I scoured the second-hand bookstores, picking up here and there. Finally, I reached the state of having about two-thirds of them, and looked forward to the point of locating the rest, and reading them in order from Tom Swift and his Flying Lab all the way through to Tom Swift and the Galaxy Ghosts.

But alas, my son, now grown, got it in his head that they were his, and threw such a fit about them that I let him have them. I had nightmares about it after that. For 35 years, I had been collecting them, and now I have to start all over, which I have done. Fortunately, the process is bit easier today; we have ebay. No more scouring the country's used bookstores hoping to strike gold. All that I've found again are in the orange spine editions unless otherwise specified in the description. I may not have another 35 years to get it done in, so I'd better hurry....

By the way, if you have any of the missing ones you're willing to sell, for the sake of God and country, email me.