The one book I will always recall reading from the Readers Digest volumes was The Haunting of Hill House, which I loved and read a couple of times even before the 1963 movie was made, and those pen-and-ink illustrations are burned into my brain.
And I actually have a copy of that volume. But not our original one.
Some years ago we had dear friends who had lived here for a long time, but they were moving back to their home in Canada (Ontario). They had owned a set of the Canadian edition that looked like what I remembered except that each book had a thin slipcase. (Maybe ours did, too, and my folks threw them away?) Anyhoo, when I saw those at their house one day I told them my history with the Shirley Jackson story. Later, when they moved, they gave me that volume -- which I absolutely still love, even if only to renew my acquaintance with those pages and those illustrations that help me to remember my own first imaginings of the people and surroundings in the book.
