When I was a little wee nipper, about eleven years old, I went exploring in an old trunk I found in the garage. And I found three battered old books. I rescued them, and read them, over and over.
One book was Seven Plays and Prefaces by George Bernard Shaw, which has profoundly shaped the way I think about and see the world from that day to this. (Those socialists, they're like the Jesuits. They get you when you're young and it's all over.) The other two were about baseball: one was without a cover or title page, but I eventually discovered that it was Arthur Daley's 1950 volume Inside Baseball, a collection of stories and anecdotes from the early days of the game.